Dear Professor Tumen,

I hope this email finds you well.

Throughout the quarter, we have been working on completing the two main WPs. When I
first saw the curriculum, I doubted my capabilities to finish the heavy workload. However, I
feel a sense of achievement when I finish all the work and find out pretty rewarding with
what I have learned in the class. I am grateful for the professor’s instructions and my
classmates’ suggestions on my revision. What I learned most this quarter was about genres. I
have never dug so deep into academic articles, infographics, and text conversations. I need to
understand the characteristics of these genres to finish the genre translation. Reading the class
material Writing about Writing, I learned another skill: MLA format. I knew the MLA format
back in high school but never practiced it so frequently. Working on different projects
enhanced my understanding of MLA. Including necessary information in the up left corner,
using proper running head, making professional in-text citation and citation page, and
utilizing correct font all contributes to making me a more experienced writer. The last
valuable ability, which I learned, is revision strategy. Our class always emphasizes
conducting peer reviews and making revisions accordingly. I was impressed when I read the
class material that the author defines revision as advising a reader instead of a writer. Back in
high school, I would only make suggestions on grammar and make comments such as “good
work.” However, I am more sophisticated with revision now, and I wish I could apply such
interdisciplinary skills in the future for essays in other disciplines. Knowing such skills can
make me more advantageous when working on papers.

After taking the course, I do not wish to define my writing style because I think it’s essential
to write differently in a different case. I have read an article in my WP2 that any unique
disciplines should not restrict writers. Back in high school writing classes, teachers had
taught us how to write a five paragraphs essay, including an introduction, body paragraphs,
and conclusion. Even to be more specific, each section has a structure that needs to follow.
During the second week, you showed us a sheet showing the difference between college and
high school writing. The most remarkable difference is that undergraduate-level writing does
not need a specific structure. A paragraph does not need to be five to eight sentences; the
length can always vary, and students can be flexible depending on the assignments’
requirements. Nevertheless, I still made conscious choices during writing and revision to
express my individuality. I like to make logical transitions. I find it hard for the reader to
react when the topic jumps around so quickly. I want to imagine it as a conversation between
people during the writing process. My listener can’t ask questions, so I must make the content
as straightforward as possible.

My final portfolio has three significant components: genre translation in WP1, explication
essay in WP1, and academic conversation in WP2. For genre translation, the original genre
that I chose is a scholarly article about cancer and chemotherapy, and my mission is to
translate the article into an infographic. The most significant difference is the change in the
discourse community. I need to make my infographic as easy to read as possible for patients
and their families. The version of the infographic in WP1 includes four graphs and three
questions that patients might care about. I tried to summarize the infographic from two pages

 into just one page and replaced all the academic articles with easy words. However, I still
received the comment that my infographic seemed too academic. In my final portfolio, I
deleted all the graphs and made my graphs explaining the difference between chemotherapy
and supportive care. Also, I created a logical transition between paragraphs. Initially, I used
the example of “10% chance of survival” and “90% chance of death” to show that patients
tend to believe the good results. However, it was still blurred with why people tend to think
the good one. In the latest version, the graph shows that chemotherapy has an 18 percent
chance of being alive at a year, while supportive care only has a 2 percent chance of being
alive at a year. In this case, most people would choose to do chemotherapy. However, another
graph shows the difference in average months that people live with supportive care and
chemotherapy is very insignificant. Then, the following paragraph talks about the best
supportive care, giving people time for hospice and prevent to die from ventilators. The
transition becomes very smooth in the last version, which helps readers to understand the
content a lot for sure. For the explication essay in WP1, I rewrote most of the paragraphs
according to what I learned in the quarter to make my article look more professional and
explain the techniques more clearly. Because I changed the infographics with my graphs, I
also changed the explication essay accordingly. For my WP2, I used a text conversation to
show what I have learned from my research for writing coherence. The text conversation is
the most challenging part of my final portfolio because I don’t know the habits when people
text in English and have no feedback from final WP2. I asked my roommate, who comes
from California, to read my text conversation and give suggestions on my work. He taught
me how to text more like a native, and I changed according to his advice. I changed
everything. Another change is I cut the picture. Initially, I used the screenshot directly, but
now I missed the information from my phone to make my work neater. It also has fewer
distractions for readers. In the revision process, specific feedback, such as making the length
of my infographic shorter, helps me more than blur feedback, such as trying to make my
work clear. I like my genre translation in my WP1 because I feel it’s the best I can do. I still
want to work more on my academic conversation in WP2 because I do not know much about
how people text in English.

As a writer, I have become more professional as an undergraduate writer rather than a high
school writer. I used a better MLA format and stronger writing coherence. The most vital
feature of my work is coherence right now. All of my research in WP2 emphasizes different
techniques to clarify an essay. Before I came to Writing 2, I did not know how to conduct
good research and cite well. Now, in my portfolio, all the written works use the correct MLA
format and detailed citation pages, demonstrating what I learned during writing class. Even in
this quarter, I have already applied the skill of doing good research and citation in my history
class. My Latin American History class demanded we write an artwork analysis. I borrowed a
documentary from the Library and cited resources from the online UCSB Library. I had great
content with these resources, which also contributed to the credibility of my essay. In
addition, I made a decent citation page. Back in high school, I only learned to research a
question on google and copy and paste the website URL into my citation page, and I did not
know if the information from the website was trustworthy or not. However, in my future
work, I can do better research and write better paragraphs with the skills and habits I learned
in Writing 2.

Sincerely,
Haoran Shi