Bobby Nguyen’s Cover Letter

Dear Alanna,

Where do I even start? Ever since joining this class in the Spring of 2022, I had never envisioned
myself ever liking writing as much as I’ve had while taking your class. Though this quarter has
come to an end, the things you’ve taught me and the compassion that you’ve shown to all your
students are what makes you deserving of your flowers. So, thank you for a beautiful experience
in my first writing course here at the University of California - Santa Barbara.

Throughout my life as a writer, I’ve always been confused about what instructors wanted from
me. Being conflicted and having trouble with almost every writing piece I’ve ever received, it
was always hard to figure out a starting point and utilize tactics in order to create a good piece.
However, now that I am at the end of this class, I feel I am better prepared to tackle the writing
that I will have to do in the academic years to come.

By engaging with the WP #1 and #2 writing projects and the tools that came with them, I was
able to really diversify my abilities in terms of writing and stem out from my usual path towards
a final draft. One of the key concepts that I learned through these projects, for example, was to
engage myself as a reader rather than passively reading just to find information. By becoming an
active reader, I was able to understand each writer’s intrinsic purposes as well as analyze how a
writer writes in order to satisfy their audiences and overall goals. Doing this, I was able to use
their tactics in my own writing after learning that the usage of another renowned author’s
formatting is able to enhance your writing and its significance. How this is apparent in my own
writing relates back to the fact that both pieces I had created strongly utilized the thoughts,
formatting, and orientation of the original pieces. In WP#1, I created a song parody that was
heavily influenced by both the original song and the original article. By analyzing the original
pieces over and over, I was able to achieve a certain flow, rhythm, and aura that led to me
successfully morphing both pieces together into a singular piece that worked tremendously. As
for WP#2, I was able to see how writers discourse with one another in order to reach their points.
Using others’ thoughts, writers are better able to formulate their own opinions and thoughts. This
is very useful for future reference since I found that it was easier to learn how to cite a person’s
work efficiently and easier to use pieces to my advantage by actively reading the articles
themselves.

With this class having an emphasis on peer review among students as well as activities revolving
around classmate interaction, I believe I learned a lot from the individuals around me. Each and
every one of the students in this class had a unique way of writing. For example, in my group of
four, each of us had our own different renditions of what a first draft contained. By putting
together groups and having us do peer reviews, I was able to get feedback from multiple
perspectives that may have not been apparent to me before. This was ultimately crucial in both of
my writing project assignments because of the fact that I was able to add much more upon
receiving the feedback, and was able to perceive my points from so many different angles. This
allowed me to create the satisfactory products I have displayed today and I will continue to
further improve my ability to peer-review as well using what we learned from the class so that
I’m not the only one benefiting from this overall experience.

In WP#1, I feel like my biggest flaw upon initial drafting was that I had an unbalanced
focus throughout my entire reflection. What this means is that I felt my essay lacked organization
and needed to be formatted better in order to please readers. In terms of successions, I was
confident that my overall translation piece was great. The reason I say this is because of the fact
that I had enjoyed every minute of crafting it since it was something I was passionate about at the
time. With this in mind prior to my first meeting with you, I would assume that you’d state that
the actual project had been stellar, but that my reflection essay needed some tweaks here and
there. I’m glad I was right.
During the actual meeting itself, I was genuinely jovial that you had liked my project and
its entirety. I was also very grateful for all the critiques that I had been given in regards to the
reflection essay, how I could better show examples, and how I could better format my lyric
analysis so that it’s cleaner to the eye. Keeping this in mind, I have definitely focused on making
it so that my essay is evenly distributed and that all aspects of my WP#1 are explained efficiently
through the reflection. The reason why I wanted to focus on this was that I knew that
organization is crucial to understanding. So, in order to make my readers understand how and
why I did this, the formatting being altered was necessary. In addition to this, I’ve found a way to
create a genius lyrics page so that you are able to follow my thoughts lyric-to-lyric. This allows
for readers such as yourself to engage with my thought processes a lot more, and see what I was
trying to do step-for-step.
After finishing this first writing project, I feel like I’ve definitely grown as a writer in
terms of tool utilization and efficiency. Before, I had always jumped into papers with the first
draft then the final draft. However, after this project, I will now proceed to use skills such as
active reading and peer revisions in order to use others to my own writer’s advantage.

WP#2 was, at first, very challenging for me. This was because I was just downright
overwhelmed with how I was going to combine more than 5 different pieces into one singular
piece. Having a research question that I was thoroughly invested in proved to be both a positive
and a negative for me. Positively, this provided me with a lot of room to choose articles and work
with them in order to create a sense of a discourse community. Contrastingly, it proved to be
negative because there were just so many answers to the question which made it hard for me to
pick and choose. Upon analyzing my final draft a day after I had submitted it, I knew right away
what parts of the project I had done well, and what parts I needed to work on. In terms of aspects
that needed work, I knew my organization was once again a flaw since some of my paragraphs
intertwined with one another midway. In addition, concision definitely needed to be looked at
since I feel like I had a lot of adverbs and adjectives that weren’t really necessary. In terms of
aspects where I felt I did a good job, I’d say I would give myself a pat on the back for bringing
the project to life and making it truly look like Instagram. Additionally, I’d say my overall
explanations for why I chose to engage in certain points throughout the project were a
representation of my best work.
After looking at the critique that you had given me just a few days before, I decided to
engage with every single critique and strive to make all the aspects pointed out better than they
were before. This included working with concision, separating my translation so that it didn’t
look clumped, and organizing the overall paper so that things weren’t confusing at any points.
Though I enjoyed a lot of things during the process of creating this piece (such as
creating the Instagram look and reading/annotating the articles themselves), my most enjoyable
portion occurred during the revision process. One of the revisions you gave me included a
statement that I should go to the concision handout and thoroughly read it. Upon reading it, I
chuckled at the fact that I had been adding words throughout all my papers all this time for no
reason! When reading through my final reflection for the first time since turning it in, I found
that most of the words that I had thrown in carried no meaning or were examples of a
double-statement where I had been saying the same thing twice, but with different words.
Revising this was very enjoyable on my part because I believed I was doing myself justice by
learning from this mistake that I’ll always keep my eyes on going forward.
With WP#2, I feel my biggest takeaways came from the revision process, the analysis of
articles, and the overall research that I did. When looking at how I did the revision process, my
biggest improvement was the elimination of non-useful words and phrases in order to enhance
the flow of my writing. In addition, organization once again became something that I could
practice when revising my essay. In terms of analysis of the articles, I learned a lot about how
authors converse with one another in each other’s work. By seeing this happen and actually
paying attention to it, I believe I’ll be able to use what I learned from these authors in the future
when I’m crafting my own research paper or when I’m trying to understand others’ research
papers. And finally, I can state with confidence that the research that I did opened my eyes to
how superior writing is crafted when you’re knowledgeable about the topic and when you’re
genuinely interested in it as well. Upon looking at the WP’s (especially WP#1), I felt that these
were examples of some of my best work solely due to the fact that I was invested in creating
these pieces and making them great.

Writing 2 definitely enhanced my skills as a writer in many different ways. Throughout all these
processes along with the activities we did and the videos we watched, I felt like I was improving
week by week as my knowledge of writing specifics grew. This portfolio is a perfect example of
who I am as a writer, and who I’ve become as a writer since it establishes both my creativity and
my willingness to learn through my various revisions. Looking at this quarter thematically, I
know for a fact that I will be walking out with a mindset that I didn’t have walking in. Walking
in the first week of the Spring quarter, I told you that I had always been hard on myself for
making mistakes even in subjects that weren’t STEM. However, walking out of this program, I
am now more willing than ever to fail and fail again as long as I keep being able to learn and
succeed. I’ve embraced the fact that all writers aren’t perfect and that subjects such as this
require trial and error if I want to be better than I was the day before. Moving forward at this
institution, I will always keep the values and tactics that I’ve learned throughout my time here to
take my writing to the next level. And I have no one else to thank, but you. So, with that being
said, I walk out today as a new writer than I was before, and I couldn’t be more excited to see
where my writing goes from here.

With gratitude,
Bobby Nguyen