Andrew Avella
Nicole Short
ENG 170
8 May 2020
Writing & Rhetoric: Reflective Cover Letter
I said this in my cover letter last semester and it still holds true: English courses have never been a forte of mine, and they still aren’t. For me, writing has consistently been a chore reserved for when a class mandated I hand in an essay. While tough, I’m not ignorant to the fact that these courses have been helpful, more so the ones I took here at New Paltz.
The day to day discussions our class had were the highlight of the course for me. Without exception, I’ve been completely disengaged with every English class I took before college. The image of an enthusiastic teacher trying to get a response from a sea of sleep deprived teenagers is burned into my eyes. I couldn’t care less about the musings of Holden in The Catcher in the Rye or the symbolism in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. I suppose the goals of these high school classes and the ones I took here at New Paltz are not entirely equal. New Paltz wanted to make sure I could write reel gud like and I would say that I can write at a level higher than the work I did in high school.
If nothing else I’ve learned why and how writing is important to a computer science major. I or anyone else could code the software that somehow ends world hunger, cures all disease, and attains world piece but it would be all for naught if whoever made it didn’t explain how it works. Beyond that, writing is the medium through which information is passed through generations in our society. Steve Jobs could not have created the iPhone without first learning how it is that earlier cell phones were created and functioned. Similarly I cannot express how I feel about the course I took and explain what I’ve gained from the past sixteen weeks without writing this letter to whoever has been tasked with reading it.
My writing has always been somewhat dense and to the point. Writing this letter now and seeing that it’s already over a page in length, I can see how I’ve learned to expand my ideas. I’ve never had to write an essay longer than three, maybe four pages and writing two five page research papers certainly forced me to think. I’m still a firm believer in the idea that writing should not require these sorts of minimum page lengths. In the same way that I’ll never need to know the quadratic formula in my professional life, the writing that I will do in my career in computer science is not going to require I fluff a two page report to four because of an arbitrary size minimum. I don’t buy that changing “equal” to “equivalent” and maxing my page margins is going to make my writing any better. I’d rather write what it is I think is important or what I have to say and be done when I feel it’s done.
The general lack of specific prompting in both ENG 160 and 170 absolutely proved to be much more of a blessing than I though it would be. Whether it be due to my structured K-12 education or just my character, I’ve always been drawn to specific instructions. Choosing a topic to write an analysis of in ENG 160 to essentially not having a prompt in ENG 170 has had me much more engaged and proud of my work, even if I was a bit lost sometimes.
I wouldn’t be opposed to taking a course or two in communication. Being able to clearly communicate ideas is a useful skill to have in general and the skills involved in communication should transfer to writing. Too often I have to stop and think about what I want to say before I say something which I think has manifested itself in slowing down the speed at which I can write. Maintaining the consistency of voice I aim for in my writing (in this letter as well) isn’t easy. I could babble on and on about the advantages and disadvantages of Java and Python or why I think Linux is a superior experience to that of Windows or macOS but I would lose focus and not be very well understood. A personal goal of mine is to get better at crafting explanations and dialogues in a coherent manner. I may not be perfect at it but this Writing and Rhetoric course has helped in this regard.