Dear Reader, 

Throughout this semester I have truly honed my skills for writing while taking this Writing and Rhetoric course. While I have experienced situations where I had to write a lot–I took AP Literature and Composition in high school, but now I truly feel like I am an experienced writer. The many projects we have done throughout the semester have been revolving around our wicked question: “What is Childhood For?” something that I had never pondered until this point. During this class we went through a series of projects that became increasingly more demanding of creative thought, and I enjoyed having to work to discover my personal voice within a topic. I think that learning what my voice is in regards to writing, has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this course, as I know how I want to come off in my writing. Additionally, I have improved in regards to how I structure and plan my writing, something I was not good at in the past, as I usually just started writing with only having a vague idea of the end-point I want to achieve. During this course, I have learned to start with a thesis, and then work out the various things that I need to highlight in order to fully develop my argument. For example, I never really took into account my audience that was reading my work, but now I understand how important that is to make sure that my audience will be able to understand from which angle I am writing from. Similarly, I worked to make sure that my writing contained all three of aristotle’s appeals, something that made my writing more developed and reliable. All in all, I think I learned a lot about how to write a well-developed paper, while also learning about myself.