To Whom It May Concern:

First, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my selected works for my portfolio. This semester I attended the advance writing class in order to improve my writing skills. The five works in the portfolio represent the process of learning. My writing class teacher is Ron. He let us read five famous works by different authors at the beginning of study. Through the five stories in the book I read, I witnessed different people and backgrounds the author wrote in the story and learned a lot from their works. I wrote the reading log on these five stories and put a lot of attention on one story.

Before joining in this class, I am not very confident about my ability to write. Because I think I only can use the simple sentence and the volume of the vocabulary is very small. This will make my essay seem not very professional. But my teacher Ron has helped me to understand that whether the essay is good or not depends on the strong thesis and the clear structure. He always lets us express the meaning which we really want to express and do not focus on the complicated words. I have made progress due to his helpfulness and guidance. I feel as though my papers can show others what exactly I think as well as share my feeling with others. The most important thing I learn from this class is to use the evidence to prove my thesis. At first, I tended to write the similar sentences to express the same meaning which can pretend I wrote a lot. From comments on my drafts the teacher gave me, I knew this is not the right way. I should use the details as the evidence. Overall, I believe my writing is becoming stronger as I mature and I like the writing more.

My first essay is draft three. It is the final version of my essay. I choose “The necklace” as my writing topic and the name of my essay is “Necklace: The Symbolism of Mathilde’s dream”. I want to have a different view of this story since it is known to all. I believe that in this paper I have few grammatical errors but I also use the details to prove my thesis. Actually, I have wrote draft one and draft two as you can see in my second essay and third essay. This is the process of improvement. In the draft one, I do not have a strong and clear thesis. In the draft two, I do not have the strong evidence.

My fourth essay is the final time-writing. The topic is to discuss one sentence in the story “ The Dead Men’s Path”. I think this sentence is an implication of warning and I also thought the priest is a very intelligent person.

My fifth essay is one of my reading log. I chose the reading log of “The Necklace”. Why did I choose this one? Because my essay is also about “:The Necklace”, I want you to know how I make the progress. This reading log can tell you how I think when I first read this story. After that you can see the way I have passed and what I learned in the end.

Thank you for taking the time to read my essay. I hope you enjoyed reading each one and that you learned from my ideas. One more thing I want you to share is the idea “ Happy writing”!

Sincerely yours,

Maggie