Contributors


Writing Program
English Dept

Analytic Paper - Cover Letter:

In your analytic cover letter, I want a detailed analysis of the thought that went into writing this paper. This can be as informal as you like, however, it needs to be thorough. One or two paragraphs is not going to be enough
to do this properly. As I speak with you while you are writing, you tell me what you are thinking and why you are deciding to do things. Put these thoughts into words and onto paper. The most common pitfall that students
have when writing an analysis is that they narrate rather than analyze. Don't just tell me what you did, talk to me about the writing. You might not talk about all of the aspects mentioned below, tell me about what was
important in your paper. What did you want to accomplish with the draft? How did you get it to meet your goals? Are there any areas in which you feel that you do not accomplish what you want to?

The numbered items below are suggestions to help your thinking, not a prescriptive list of what must be in your cover letter. Analyzing is a difficult skill; do not get frustrated if you get stuck. Write down what you are unsure
about and we will work with it.

1) How did you come up with your idea. If you changed topics, tell us why. What didn’t work with the first topic any why will your second choice work better?

2) How did you choose to use the discovery draft? How does this help you to organize your thoughts? What difficulties did you have as you tried to get thoughts down on paper?

3) How did you move from discovery draft to first draft? How did you decide to organize it? What details did you add? What problems did you have with it? What was your goal for your first draft?

4) What kinds of peer response did you get? How was it helpful? How could it have been more helpful?

5) What changes did you make as moved onto the second draft? Why? What did you decide to leave alone? Why? How did you choose to incorporate your peers' suggestions? What was your goal for your second
draft? How do you feel about the paper at this point?

6) As you finish the second draft, what would you have changed if you could go back? What changes do you still want to make? What will you do differently as you begin your next paper?

Also include any other thoughts about your writing that may fall outside the above guidelines. Remember, we know the steps you took in writing this paper; we want an analysis of where those steps took you.

Sample analysis:

When I first heard what we were supposed to do for this paper, I felt overwhelmed. I had no idea what to write about. There really hasn’t been any one experience that has changed me. The activities that we did in class
helped, because when Amy read my freewrite, she suggested that I write about softball, so I decided to do that. I wasn’t sure that it had really had a huge impact on me, but it was better than anything else that I could come
up with.

When I sat down to write, I was a little confused by exactly what I was supposed to do. I am used to just sitting down and writing a paper, and all of these different drafts were a little confusing to me, and to be honest, just seemed like more work. The discovery draft wasn’t as bad as I thought though. Since it didn’t have to be anything wonderful, I could just talk about all of my ideas. After I wrote this, I realized that I had a lot of softball experiences, but I still didn’t see why anyone else would want to read about them.

I felt pretty intimidated at this point. Everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and all that I had were a bunch of stories about me playing softball. My instructor came by to talk about my discovery draft
with me and asked if anything was similar in all of the stories I remembered. While they weren’t all wonderful moments, they were all times that I felt proud of. Then she suggested that I think about what I learned while playing softball. There were a lot of things that I learned while playing—teamwork, dedication, perseverance, etc. But I decided to talk about how softball had taught me perseverance and how this has helped me do other things too.

Knowing this made the first draft easier to write. I already knew what stories that I wanted to use, so I just talked about how each of them had taught me perseverance and then added some examples of how this
experience has helped me off the field. It was pretty short when I was done, but she said not to worry, so I didn’t. I was kind of worried about peer response, because I was worried that everyone who read would think
that it was stupid or say who cares. But I was surprised because the peer response really helped. Well one did. One person just said that it was good and that they liked it. I was glad that they liked it, but all they said
was to add details. The other response said that the was a little confused about how the events that I had talked about taught me perseverance, so I guess that I need to explain that more clearly. He also suggested that I start off with a story, because those are interesting and they would bring the reader in. He wanted more details too, so I definitely had to do that.

For the second draft, I did all the things that my peers said, but I also rearranged the whole paper. I decided to start off with a story, then talk about perseverance, then put in another story. I took out my third story and just added details to the other two. After the second story I talked about what I learned from these experiences. I’m not sure if I need to add more details still, or not. I don’t know what else to change or add, either, but I
think that my essay is much clearer now. Rather than just a bunch of stories, it is now about perseverance, and the stories help to illustrate that point. I think that in my next draft I will refine this idea even further, and talk
about how perseverance is essential in life, and how I learned this.

Overall, I would say that this paper wasn’t as hard to write as I thought. After hearing about all of the drafts that we would have to do, I thought that it would be awful, but it wasn’t. Because each draft didn’t have to be
perfect, they were easier to write. And it was nice to have someone else give me ideas of what to do next.

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