December 7, 2016

Dear Mrs. Davis,

The portfolio I have assembled is a collection of my writing over the past year and a half.
I began my college writing career in Basic Composition and Critical Reading due to my ACT
scores. I give much of the credit to my success in writing to my instructors in those Basic
courses, Mary McDonald and Starla Reed. I learned all the things that I needed to become a
critical thinker and accomplished writer that I had not learned in high school. I believe that I
matured quite a bit during my early college days. I became comfortable with writing essays by
beginning with learning the proper structure for sentences and paragraphs. I developed my own
style of composition and discovered my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I became adept
with grammar but realized I still needed to work harder with word choice. I am an avid user of a
thesaurus.
The first piece I selected in my portfolio was one of the essays I wrote for English
Composition I for Mrs. Tamera Davis. The essay was a personal narrative titled, A Magical
Teacher. I chose this essay as my first selection since it was published in a professional
magazine called OT Practice. This essay was a heartfelt story of my experiences with my
Occupational Therapist, Diane Fosmire. This essay shows my personality and expresses my
thoughts about growing up and learning from a one-of-a-kind teacher.
The second essay I chose was You Still Got a Friend in Me, a compare/contrast
analysis of Toy Story and its sequel Toy Story 2. I like comparing and contrasting information,
once again I am able to write about my true feelings about a subject. This essay was near and
dear to me, because these movies were a big part of my childhood entertainment as well as being

the genre for which I became interested in pursuing as a career. My writing is a smooth blending
of opinions with facts.
The third essay I included in my portfolio was an argumentative essay about the
importance of advertising in a free market system. I like this essay because I think I presented a
strong case for the importance of advertising. I used a great number of examples to illustrate my
points. This essay has current information and is easy to read, it has a nice flow. I wrote this
during my Basic Composition course so it was one of my earlier works. It demonstrates some of
the problems I have been working to correct with my writing, for example, sentence length.
There are quite a few very brief sentences in this essay that could have been lengthened by
joining them together with the addition of a simple conjunction.
The final essay I added to my portfolio is an informative, research-based piece on South
Korea, that I wrote for my summer term World Geography course. This essay was fun for me to
write because I have a great interest in the countries of Asia. I was born in Japan and lived there
for a short time growing up. My cousin served as a source for this paper, since she had lived in
Kunsan, South Korea, for a year. Using a unique first-person perspective made this essay
different than a typical research-based essay with third person information. I consider myself a
geography enthusiast, so writing this essay over such a distinctive locale was easy and fun. I do
well with facts and figures so this type of writing suits me quite well.
I have developed my reading skills tremendously over the past year, this in turn has had a
positive impact on my writing. I learned to read more critically and analytically which has helped
me with comprehension and general knowledge. My writing process involves brainstorming and
research. When Im unsure about a topic in general, I will research the topic, define words that
may be new to me as well as ask others about what they might know about the particular subject.

I have a few go-to sources that I will look to for guidance, one of my favorites is BrainPOP.com
but, I have really become a fan of tutor.com as well. There are so many tools out there for
struggling writers to use to become better at their craft. I think that I am strong in using the rules
of grammar, and that I need more work on general knowledge of subjects since I do not predict
very well, I need to do a lot of research and acquire much needed background information.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I hope you have enjoyed my work as much as I
have enjoyed writing it.

Sincerely,

Kirby C. Scott