To Whom It May Concern:

            Before this course, I felt mostly indifferent toward my writing. I felt as though I could write well enough to communicate a point across effectively, and well enough to fulfill my academic requirements.

 In Writing and Rhetoric, I learned how to make more clear and concise statements. Because of this, I have been able to improve on making my thoughts more clear to a reader, and have learned when and how to remove unnecessary information that could make a statement unclear.

In this class, I learned how to better close read and annotate texts. In one of my other classes, we have weekly readings which we need to annotate. So, by learning how to better analyze texts and how to provide more in-depth annotations, the annotations I did for my other class improved as well.

One example of critical reading and thinking practice that I have done in this class is my journals on the novel The Everything Box. These journals were a way for me to reflect on the chapters of the book, to express my opinion on the novel, and to criticize things within the novel I felt were worthy of criticism. These skills will be useful in my future as they have allowed me to learn how to effectively provide criticism, and also have allowed me an outlet to express my opinions. Another example of this that I have done in this class is my journal responses to one of our textbooks, Monsters: A Bedford Spotlight Reader. In these journals, we were typically asked to respond to certain essays that were found in the book. Through this, I was able to learn how to critically think about academic writing, a skill which will be useful throughout the rest of my college career.

I now know that college level writing isn’t always exclusively formal and strict. I have had this change in perception due to one of our assignments in the class, our visual memoirs. Our visual memoirs were not necessarily extremely formal papers, they were more reflections than anything. Because of this, college level writing does not seem as extremely intimidating or strict.

One thing I have learned about the writing process is that when brainstorming, you may find out that your initial ideas may not work after all. A few times when brainstorming for assignments this has happened to me, and I found out that my ideas for a paper may not actually be as good as I thought, and sometimes have even gone to change the topic I am writing about entirely. I have also learned that drafts do not always need to resemble a finished paper. For our major paper assignments, many of my first drafts were just lists, outlines, and ideas jumbled together. In the past, I had thought that drafts were supposed to be unrevised versions of a final paper, but I’ve found that less formal drafts are just as effective and acceptable.

Some writing-related skills that I now consider to be strengths of mine include stronger writing for presentations, and writing in terms of critical thinking and analysis. I have never really considered presentations to be one of my strengths, but for our presentation assignment, I was able to create a presentation that included main points and only significant information. I now know how to write and create presentations in a way that communicates only relevant and important information, and that communicates my point across effectively. Our journal assignments have helped me become stronger in terms of critical thinking, and in writing analytically. By analyzing texts for these assignments, I feel more confident in my critical thinking and writing skills.

I feel very well prepared, in terms of college and professional level writing expectations. I think that my improvement over the course of the semester has allowed me to feel more confident in my abilities that I will be able to meet these expectations.

My attitude towards my writing, and the task of writing in general, has not changed much. But, I do feel more secure in myself and my abilities, and do not see writing as such a daunting task anymore.

Best,

Cassie Eggert