Carter Gamache
Professor Kissel
ENG170-14
9 December 2024
Reflective Cover Letter
After several readings, assignments, projects, and discussion posts, I’m so thankful to have been able to enhance many skills throughout this semester. In taking Writing and Rhetoric, I believe I was most successful in furthering my persuasive writing skills and being more effective in selecting the information that I present. Before taking this course, I was pretty confident in my writing abilities – which was the problem. I learned that there was so much more of an approach to take before completing an assignment and much more to be aware of during the writing process. A problem I came across were my frequent inclusions of unnecessary information, where I could have constructed a more effective piece if I was more selective in the information I present. I saw this as a significant moment of growth when I was able to overcome his boundary by not being afraid to delete whole paragraphs that don’t feel maximally effective. I feel that was the factor that was most responsible for my instances of weak writings. I think that this change is most evident between my thesis slideshow draft and final version. With such an open-ended prompt, in order to get your point across most effectively and memorably, the information presented should be calculated and maximally important as well as relevant in order to keep a captivated audience.
In response papers for my art history class, we are frequently asked to write about an author’s analysis on a work of art, from our lesson on identifying media bias and close reading, I was able to better come to a stance whether agreeing with the author’s analysis or not and crafted one of my best responses to an assignment.
In my Detailed Research Proposal, I saw the most success in my critical thinking skills in the construction of my theories regarding the success of Lana Del Rey. She has such a passionate fandom and saw her success connecting to her music being relatable, and her seeming more like a friend than a distant Hollywood Star. Her music is also incredibly powerful and touches people who relate to it, and contrarily people who don’t relate to her music want to, as her songwriting is mostly about her life which fans somehow see desirable despite her frequent hardships. In another instance in my Final Thesis Presentation, I was lucky enough to witness an internet sensation in real time that I could connect to my new thesis. While critically thinking about the timelessness of Lana Del Rey’s song “Video Games,” I was thrilled to see that one of my favorite niche TikTokers had sang a cover of the song I was analyzing the impact of, and previously having not seen success on the app, her rendition of “Video Games” had gone incredibly viral. I had a field day connecting it to my thesis. Being able to put someone’s complicated success into words and being able to connect any thesis to everyday encounters are great skills that I will use during my future of becoming an educator, and these will continue to carry on into my future classroom where I would pass these skills down to future students.
Though before college, I was confident in my writing abilities, college writing seemed unapproachable and almost impossible, but in the welcoming environment of this class and effective advice in approaching the writing process, it’s changed the way I perceive this previously mind-numbing task. I see it as a much more open-ended and accepting process and am much more comfortable sharing my work.
My favorite part of the writing process would be the drafting phase, and my favorite approach is free write. I see great success in this as I’m able to get so many thoughts down while writing with no barriers and can actually incorporate a lot of my gibberish in my final writing. My Thesis Slideshow Draft could be viewed as a free write before the construction of my final presentation. If I hadn’t used that free write strategy, I envision my final presentation looking something like my draft. Furthermore, in my Final Thesis Slideshow, you can vaguely see the distant free write draft after my revisions, my next favorite process, where I moved around my big ideas to be maximally engaging and memorable for the audience.
Overall, after taking this course, I see my strengths in identifying media bias and achieving my purpose in my writing. However, rhetorical appeals are such important aspects of a work that I should incorporate into my work more frequently. Ultimately, I feel incredibly prepared in college and later professional writing contexts, but again, I felt confident in my abilities before college…
I believe I saw great success in my research practices during this semester, and because it went so smoothly, in later research projects I feel that they will be a breeze. Most of my confidence comes from the abundance of great sources available on the library search engine. On the other hand, I saw the most difficulty in properly crediting the sources I cite. I consistently get points off for incorrect citations in numerous classes across many different paper formats. I think that this is an easy fix though and I’ll see success in this in the future. Finally the in-person library instructional session made these research practices much more approachable in organizing all of the different steps of the process. We also carried out these steps using a prompt of our choosing making it a maximally productive and effective session.