Dear Review Team,

I’ve always thought I was a good writer; it’s a skill that I’ve felt confident with. However, when I started college, I quickly found out that I wasn’t writing with any style. I found out that I was always regurgitating facts with little argument involved. Thankfully, Writing and Rhetoric changed that about how I write. Now, I know that I’m writing in a way that makes what I’m saying interesting. Everything I write now is more than a summary; it’s reflection and application. I am now able to take different practices and mold them together to make, what I believe to be, a great paper.

I used to write so dryly and purely with fact. When I look back on some of the papers I wrote in high school, I can see that I wrote like Spock. It wasn’t interesting or engaging; even my hooks were rather dull. This alters my papers a lot more than I expected it to. For instance, at the beginning of my reflection of Bruno Bettelheim’s essay, I started my paper with something more eye catching, I said “I don’t like children” (Gafford, “An Articulation of “The Struggle for Meaning” by Bruno Bettelheim,” 1). This changes the entire tone of the paper. It makes the reader wonder why I would write an essay about the minds of children if I didn’t like them. It’s noticeably different from any other hook that I’ve written. I also incorporate a stronger voice in my conclusions; I used to always use call-to-actions to persuade the reader, but since I’ve started writing with personal experience and anecdotes, the call-to-actions are significantly more effective. They show the audience that what I’m talking about is not only important large-scale, but also personally. This is useful in my career field because working as a psychologist, I should be able to relate to my client and help them through what they’re dealing with. If I acted dryly (as I did in my papers before taking Writing and Rhetoric), my client would just shut down. They would feel like I couldn’t feel what they’ve felt and therefore didn’t understand their problem.

Another important tactic I’ve learned to use in ENG170, is to utilize examples to elaborate my claims. For example, in my main research paper, I explain why stories like The Hobbit get so popular; it’s because they draw kids toward the adventure and fantasy that J. R. R. Tolkien writes about (Gafford, “Why Children Need Fairy Tales: A Psychological Breakdown,” 4). In this case, that example lets the reader look at successful books and understand that there is a reason that these stories get popular. Overall, this technique can be extremely useful. In other cases, this technique allows writes to establish their credibility or even prove a point. For me, this method allowed me to emphasize the idea that kids are drawn to fantasy and adventure, a pivotal point in my paper.

In a segment of a book that we discussed in class, entitled Telling Writing, we talked about how students are constantly writing what they think that the professor wants to read. In fact, this is how we’ve been taught to write. Teachers feed into this by making menial comments in the margins that students don’t understand. Because of this, students make the corrections but never truly understand why they needed to edit their paper in the first place (Macrorie 11-12). This essay is powerful because it was the first piece of writing that really taught me that I need to write with my own voice, not some stiff voice that I think my professor wants to read.

Writing and Rhetoric was a wonderful class. The only thing I wish could’ve been altered was the one-on-one time with professor to discuss my writing. I met with my professor to discuss two of my assignments and I felt like that was the time that my writing was truly changed. I struggled a lot with relying on peer review because I hardly got the feedback that I needed to improve my writing. Other than that, I thought the class was well laid out and well taught. I enjoyed all the writing assignments and I felt like I had the freedom to write and develop my techniques as a writer. I still believe that my writing needs to mature; however, I believe that the strength of my writing will increase with time. I stand by the phrase “practice makes perfect” and I feel like I just need to experience different assignments before I’m confident in the way that I write. I definitely have all the tools I need, so it’s just up to me to use them in the future.

Thank you for your time,

Alicea

 

 

Works Cited

Gafford, Alicea. “Why Children Need Fairy Tales: A Psychological Breakdown.” 7 October 2019.

Gafford, Alicea. “An Articulation of ‘The Struggle for Meaning’ by Bruno Bettelheim.” 6 November 2019.

Macrorie, Ken. “The Poison Fish,” Telling Writing. Boynton Cook, 1985, pp. 11-14.