Cover Letter

Dear Lisa Bernhagen,

Thank you for taking the time to look through my portfolio. I’ve included the best examples of my writing to give you a good idea of my skills.
My response essay, “The Easy Road to Censorship: Think of the Children,” is written in a different style than my compare & contrast essay, “Only Dreams Remain: Trapped in the Cycle of Poverty.” After evaluating my writing tendencies and style issues, I changed both the outline and the style of my response essay from what I had originally drafted. I’ve never had to concentrate on grammar or spelling; they’ve always come naturally to me. Instead, I focus on improving my style – making powerful statements and engaging the reader with an active voice. When I edit, I’m usually looking for passive verbs and boring sentences.

Normally, I’m very focused on answering “what?” in the body of my essay. What is the other person saying? What do I think about it? It’s easy for me to come up with an answer for “what?” since I have a very clear understanding of my topics and what I plan to write about them. However, “what” tends to make for rather dry reading. In my compare & contrast essay, this theme of answering “what?” shows up often and it makes for a rather boring essay. The first paragraph answers what is important; the second paragraph answers what is the audience, and so on. On its own, each paragraph is a decent piece of writing, but they don’t flow together; they lack transitions. Starting around the 8th paragraph, I made a significant effort to revise my draft to tie the paragraphs together using simple transitions – nothing fancy. In the conclusion, between the first two and last two sentences of the last paragraph, I tried to add some “why” to help draw the reader’s attention toward what I want them to see.

For my response essay, I wanted to experiment with answering “why?” to form all of my ideas. Each paragraph is my attempt to answer “why?” It provided a much more interesting essay, and I hope more enjoyable to read. I start with a summary, and draw my first conclusion: He wants the music industry to stop promoting Eminem’s album. Why? He wants to hide the existence of such offensive albums. Why? The lyrics are harmful to children…

Changing the premise under which I wrote the response essay made it so different from what I normally write that I can barely recognize it as my own. However, despite the difference in premise, I was able to retain my strengths. My editing skills make me focus on correcting form and message rather than style and content. My form – grammar, syntax, punctuation and spelling – is just as good as in my compare & contrast essay. Also, I think my message – the ideas I’m trying to communicate to you, not the words I’m using to communicate them – still comes across effectively in the response essay.

I’ve expended a lot of effort to focus on style. In the end, I think it’s been worth it. With enough practice, I hope powerfully crafted essays will come as easily to me as correctly spelled words. Thank you again for looking through my portfolio.

Sincerely,

Ashley Winters