Thank you for taking time to read my portfolio. I have selected five pieces of my works which I did during this class.
The first one is the reading log of “The Grass Eaters”. The second is my final time-writing. The third is my trial draft, then draft two and finally draft three. Through this course, I leant how to analyze a story and write an interpretative essay. At the beginning, I had totally no idea about how to read a story. I only found out the words that I did not know in the dictionary, then moved on to another story. After I attended this course, however, I discovered the pleasure of reading and finding out the words you do not know is only the first step. A lot of details and implicit meanings suddenly appear before my eyes and these works represent different periods of this exciting experience.
    It is difficult to get started. I had never tried academic writing before. But Mr. Corio has always been helpful, giving me guidance and encouragement all the time. My writing skills improve as well as my reading skills due to his helpfulness. The biggest problem for my writing is that I always write an extended summary instead of giving evidence to support my thesis statement. In my draft two, Mr Corio pointed out this and told me my essay “will be better” if I changed this. This warm encouragement helped me get through this and gave me the courage to do it all over again.
    The first paper deals with “The Grass Eaters”. It is my first time to do a reading log so this one has many problems. I chose this one because my essay is talking about the same story and this reading log reflects my first response to this story. Obviously you can predict what my draft one and draft two will be like. This is more like a summary than a response. There is little about what I think and what message I want to convey.
    The second is my final time-writing which discusses the priest in “The Dead Men’s Path”. I talked about the meaning of his words and his character. I did not read this story much before so maybe there were some misinterpretation. It seems to me that his words have strong power to persuade people if they can understand its meaning.
    The third one is my trial draft. Frankly speaking, it is an incomplete one. I did some free-writing so it showed my flow of thought. When I looked back, I realized that I made the fundamental error of writing an extended summary. I paid price for this mistake in the following weeks.
    The fourth one is my draft two. Because I just did some revision on the trial draft, with little surprise, this was a terrible one. However, I did not lose heart. At least, I made a strong thesis statement, and what I needed was to find out evidence to support my ideas. I also turned to the textbook and carefully studied how to write an interpretative and persuasive essay. Finally I made up my mind to do it all over again.
    The fifth is my draft three. I am quite satisfied with this piece of work because I have done my best. I listed three reasons to support my thesis statement: instead of being optimistic, they had sunk to the depth of despair. I also gave a lot of evidence and details to support my statement and having been edited carefully, this essay has little grammatical and spelling errors.
    I hope you enjoyed reading my portfolio. Thank you!

Sincerely,
Fred