Reflective Cover Letter
Ashe Matteson
Dear English Department,
Before this course, I wasn’t particularly fond of writing. In high school, we were taught to write essays in a specific way; but this method of writing essays made my work boring and redundant. I was much more interested in creative and narrative writing, and found that I was better at it than research-based essays. Even coming into college and taking English 160, I found that I still struggled with writing essays that were not in the narrative style. Coming into Writing and Rhetoric was very intimidating given the fact that I was not confident in my non-narrative writing, since I was under the impression this is what the course was all about.
However, things began to change over the course of this semester. After learning that our “wicked question” was “what is representation and how do we present ourselves?” and looking over the syllabus, I realized that this course is not at all what I thought. While there was a lot of non-narrative writing at the beginning of the semester, I found that in actuality, I had lots of freedom compared to what I had in high school; and my attitude towards writing started to change. I started to think less of writing essays how I was taught in high school, and instead think about my writing from the perspective of approaching the assignment in a way that will appeal to an audience. How can I make it more interesting to read? Am I using the appropriate language for this style of writing? Do I have a clear thesis and claims for my argument? Andrea Lunsford even says in Everyone’s An Author “If you’re writing in response to an assignment, make sure you understand what it asks you to do… Look for words like argue, evaluate and analyze…” (115) Taking this into account and asking questions like these helped me enjoy the writing process more than I ever thought I could.
Before this course, I struggled with revising, editing, and even writing first drafts. I used to try and make my first draft perfect– or as perfect as I could manage– by starting with an introductory paragraph without an outline in mind. This caused me lots of trouble when trying to go back and edit them. I felt like there was nothing I could do to make my draft sound or flow better, since I had put as much effort as I could into it. Now, I approach the drafting process differently. When I have a topic that I want to write about, I start my first draft by making a list of bullet points of ideas I want to talk about, with subcategories of evidence and specific sentences that might come to mind. From there, I use this as an outline for how my essay should be formatted and start writing whatever comes to mind. I needed to get out of the mentality that my first drafts needed to be perfect and refined and needed to start thinking that it’s just a first draft; it doesn’t need to be perfect.
I feel that my research paper and artist statement essay are the most successful works in my portfolio. In my artist statement essay, I feel that I organized the essay well and my ideas flow together nicely, which is something that I used to struggle with when writing. After receiving feedback on my first draft, I learned that my sentences can become wordy and I tend to write in a way that convolutes the idea that I am trying to get across to my audience. This helped me learn to write without using words like “such” and “very”. My research paper is a successful paper because of how I utilize my evidence and appeal to the audience to convince them of my argument. There are many instances where I use logos to effectively communicate my point by citing evidence from sources that have confirmed studies done to support my point.
In my research essay, I believe I could have made my transitions between paragraphs and ideas better. Some spots in my essay feel out of place and could have been incorporated better. Adding better transitions and expanding more on my ideas could helped by ideas flow together better and help them feel less disjunct. In my artist statement, I think I could have expanded on my ideas and thoughts about the poem more. Although I think the general point of my essay came across well, I could have gone into more detail when explaining my evidence and talking about why I structured my poem the way I did.
I found that Chimamada Adichie’s TED Talk was the most beneficial to me. Since our class is focused around representation, I found the TED Talk to be very relevant to our class, but also to life in general. How a story is told about a person or group of people is the first way you will perceive them and think of them; you don’t have any other ideas about who they are. This relates to our class because a group of people is often represented one way in the media (on the news, social media, etc.), and that becomes the only idea of those people in our heads; thus beginning the single story. From there stems different stereotypes and misconceptions, which tends to spread like a wildfire. This becomes dangerous and harmful to these people that the single story is about because many stereotypes are simply untrue. The point of Adichie’s TED Talk is that these single stories are harmful, and we should be breaking them down by doing our own research.
Overall, I believe my work has improved significantly over the course of this semester. I have gotten better at creating connections in my writing in order to support my argument and claim, and make it stronger. I have learned that my thesis does not have to be extremely specific to the point that it becomes more than a sentence in length, it just needs to encompass all my main ideas. That way, I can talk about more specific ideas that are related to my thesis in my body paragraphs. I still need to improve on making my writing more concise. I have a habit of making my sentences run on for too long, which in turn makes them more convoluted. By making my ideas more concise, my sentences can become shorter and will allow me to vary my sentence structures to make my writing more interesting to read. In addition to this, I believe that I can also work on my development of an argument. I have all the right pieces to make a good argument (a thesis, claims, supporting evidence from credible sources), but developing an argument and explaining how my evidence relates back to my claims and thesis is harder for me, since I feel that the writing gets redundant. Despite all this, I am confident I have put forward my best work for my portfolio and know that what I have learned from this course will be reflected in my writing.
Works Cited
Lunsford, Andrea A., et al. Everyone’s an Author. W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.