Portfolio Cover Essay

Dear reader,

UWP001 is a course that has a lot of reading and writing, and it is quite tough because every

project and homework assignment goes very fast so that I must push myself very hard. However,

the course is very meaningful and useful for it uncovers a lot of my weaknesses. UWP 001 has

five aspects of learning outcomes which are rhetorical knowledge, processes, knowledge of

conventions, research, and metacognition; I would like to talk about how this course improves

these abilities of mine, and, furthermore, how I can make progress on them in the future.

First, I would like to talk about rhetorical knowledge. During the rhetorical analysis project, I

have written a responsive essay focused on a new article, and have studied about how those key

rhetorical concepts relate to that article, and how they influence the article. For example, my

rhetorical analysis talks about the rhetorical situation of my rhetorical object, including the

audience, the exigence, and the constraints. The exigence is what need to be done for the

situation, and the constraints are how your articles should be shaped. I also find that the audience

of an article will decide the exigence, and the constraints are derived from the exigence and the

audience.

Second, I am able to fully understand and utilize the advantage of processes I have learned in

UWP001. During the quarter, I have discussed about the assigned readings with my classmates

frequently, and we have shared our thoughts and ideas about the readings and the authors
thoroughly. Meanwhile, there were many peer reviews during the classes which we helped revise

our drafts with each other. I was good at looking for the logical problems in my classmates

articles. Due to different people have different genres and contexts in their articles, I learned to

deal with different types of rhetoric during the peer reviews. Also through these peer reviews, I

got many feedbacks from different people, and I learned to recognize which suggestions of my

classmates are helpful, and which are not. These useful suggestions helped me compose many

drafts for each project. For example, my rhetorical analysis project has a lot of problems in the

first draft I did not fully understand how I should construct my ideas in my article and what I

should include. However, now in my final draft, it includes several aspects of analysis of my

rhetorical object its rhetorical situation, its citations, and its evidence. I learned these from

reading my peers drafts, so I think I have well utilized the benefits of processes.

Third, in my literacy narrative project, I compared different discourse communities and found

that how conventions shaped their languages. I learned that how a culture influences a language

so that what difference is existing among English, Chinese, and Japanese. For example, in my

project, I mentioned that I had read a Japanese book in three different language versions, and I

found that the translators did not completely translate a sentence from the original language to

English or Chinese; instead, the translators wanted to make the dialogues in the book fit into

their discourse communities. I think this is one of the aspect I learned about the knowledge of

conventions, and I also learned the academic discourse community I am staying now on campus

is also very different from where I stayed at home. When I was at home talking with my family

members, I did not intentionally shape my language I would speak what I was thinking directly.

However, on campus, I shaped my language to be official, to be logical and reasonable, because I

am discussing with and persuading my classmates and instructors. Here I understood that,

language is tool not only for making communication easier, but also for influencing others

thoughts by complicated rhetoric.

Forth, I want to talk about my research, which I think is the hardest one during the quarter, and

the most necessary one I need to improve in my future. There were two projects including

research, and I want to talk about the research of my rhetorical analysis. The author of my

rhetorical object is called David Greenwald, who is the founder and an editor of Davis Vanguard,

a news website in local Davis. For my primary research, I got my information by interviewing

him I visited him and sent him emails. Because the topic of his article is controversial, the

information derived from the interview helped me understand his thoughts a lot. I collected his

responses and analyzed which of them are logical and useful for my project. (Since some

responses did not directly answer my question so I considered them as unhelpful.) However, I

was not good at my secondary research. The secondary research is finding some authorized

sources to enhance my ideas and arguments, but since my topic is too narrow, I spent a lot of

time looking for articles which could inforce my thesis statements. Eventually, I think I need to

improve my ability of secondary research so that I can utilize this resource to construct a better

argumentation article.

Finally, I would like to talk about how I learned about metacognition by reconsidering and

reflection during the quarter. I read many different articles having different rhetorical situations,

genres, and structures; therefore, it is very important for me to make a proper choice of my

rhetoric while writing my articles. While composing, I will first think about what genre is my
article, and then consider who is the audience. Depending on what I just said, I will choose the

tone and the structure of my article. For example, in my literacy narrative, I am using

conversational tone which is not formal; however, in my rhetorical analysis, due to its academic

property, I use a formal tone. And after composing, I will read my article over and over again to

look for where I did wrong and where I could improve. Therefore, I think I will utilize the

method of metabolism in the future either.

This is what all I want to talk about my learning outcomes after this quarter. I think I have well

developed my abilities of rhetorical knowledge, processes, knowledge of conventions, and

metacognition; also, I will put more efforts in improving my ability of research. Overall,

UWP001 is meaningful, and I really appreciate this course for bringing so much knowledge and

experience to me. I believe these knowledge and experience will help me during UWP101, and

in my future.

Sincerely,

Fangzhou Li