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Nick Bianchi

Josh Smith

Writing 2

9 December 2019

Final Cover Letter

Writing Two has been an interesting class for me. The writing assignments were always

challenging but manageable and Josh’s style and personality made the class a lot more fun. I

enjoyed the in-class assignments because Josh just made class interesting. The writing projects

seemed boring and difficult to me as I was writing them, and now that I am revising them for the

final time, I still think the assignments were boring. It was not until I was writing my final

revisions that I realized how much I had learned in this class. I learned how to revise, how to

make my essays cohesive and coherent, how to read like a writer, and how to understand any

writing by analyzing its conventions, rhetorical situation and genre. I think these skills are al

very important and I now realize the purpose of Writing Two and how profound these things are

for my collegiate career. The biggest thing I learned was how to revise my essays to the best of

my ability. I found that the way Josh suggested we revise our essays was extremely effective. I

did not enjoy the revising process, I found it to be grueling. The revising process took a lot of

time because I had to take a break whenever I started mindlessly copying my sentences word for

word. Now that I know how to revise effectively, I am much more confident in my essays.

I used to think revision was changing a word here and a word there, to make the essay

sound more educated. Now I understand this is not revising at all. Revising is reading each

sentence you wrote and thinking, “what point is this sentence trying to make, and how can I
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make it better”. In my first paragraph I titled it abstract matching the conventions of the

chemistry article. I then thought about the purpose of the first paragraph, read through it to find

sentences that were not coherent with the rest of the sentences in the paragraph, or were

repetitive. I decided to remove the sentence “the rhetorical situation is that chemists…” because

the first paragraph is explaining how chemistry is a complex course, describing the purpose of

chemistry, and the conventions used. I replaced it with the sentence “chemistry conventions

include…” because this sentence was more cohesive with the rest of the paragraph. I decided to

split my essay into 6 paragraphs, which is surprisingly the same as my original. However, I

changed the format of my entire essay to make it more coherent. It originally didn’t make sense

because my first two paragraphs were confusing and not coherent. The first two paragraphs were

also followed by a paragraph titled “introduction”, which doesn’t make sense. Now I rearranged

the essay and titled every paragraph. I did this because it is more consistent with the conventions

of chemistry, clearer to the reader, and it is cohesive. I made extensive changes to writing project

one to fix the coherence and cohesion, just like Writing Project Two.

While revising Writing Project One I found it was very poorly written. I had to make a lot

of changes to the overall structure, including more paragraphs, rearranging the paragraphs, and a

lot of changes within each paragraph to make it more cohesive. For example, in my Writing

Project 1 I originally stated, “Online dating is a completely new genre for this generation; The

conventions used are entirely different from the antecedent genres because the rhetorical

situation has changed.” And revised it to say, “Online dating profiles are a new genre, with its

own conventions and rhetorical situations that are distinctly different from the antecedent genres,

speed dating and bar dating.” I first changed the identified genre because it was brought to my

attention that online dating is not a genre, online dating profiles are. Once you pointed this out to
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me, I understood that. Online dating profiles is the genre because that is the writing. Online

dating profiles have an author, audience and a subject. The conventions of online dating are in

the profiles. I changed the rest of the sentence because it was vague and felt confusing and

choppy. I revised it to be more cohesive, and flow better. I decided to include what the

antecedent genres were so that I was introducing the antecedent genres rather than just vaguely

saying “antecedent genres”.