To whom it may concern,

This course has been very influential in improving my writing skills this semester. Over the wide range of assignments we had, each assignment enabled the students to learn about new things that we did not know before. The course Writing and Rhetoric has taught me time management while writing, taught me essential skills as to how to find the right kind of credible sources, and incorporate all of the information in a structured manner with the given number of word count limits. Writing extensive papers such as the “Research Paper” in this semester has taught me to elaborate and explain my points further clearly to the audience rather than just being informative on the paper as I used to before.

Classroom strategies such as collective togetherness were achieved by reading and commenting on the reflected blogs by each of our classmates. Prior to this course, I always had trouble figuring out the MLA format and how it all needs to be cited in a specific way. This course has helped me resolve that problem and has made me understand clearly what needs to be included in MLA format and how to write it in the right manner. This class has taught me various skills as there were different kinds of varied assignments assigned to us and each of them was a new learning experience.

The Research Paper was by far the most extensive and most important assignment for this semester during which students had the opportunity to write a long paper with several drafts included for practice. This process of writing several revisions of the paper has helped me pinpoint specific areas of my writing and improve each aspect by going over it several times. This process of multi-evaluation has been the biggest take-away for me in this course as I had to be very passionate and dedicated to my writing. I always used to find extensive writing hard prior to this course. I used to feel really lazy to write long essays and papers. However, this course has opened my eyes to new discoveries. It made me realize that I can indeed fall in love with the whole writing process. The different kinds of assignments such as the persuasive speech, the annotated bibliography, oral presentations, and other in-class writing and activities have improved my other abilities such as speaking, critical thinking, organized planning, etc. The main reason for this improvement is that this course has made me discover a new liking for rhetoric writing and the way the instructor has taught the course made me fall in love with writing.

During this course, I have learned new methods and strategies to improve my writing skills. These include – brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, and more. These strategies have made me realize my previous faults and rectify them to improve the quality of my writing. One of my key strengths now is definitely critical thinking. I lay out my resources on a much broader scale doing sufficient research through each one of them. My other strengths include choosing the right kind of audience for my paper, writing it in a structured manner and also I feel that my vocabulary has certainly improved during this course. However, I feel there are certainly other areas in which there is an improvement in my writing process. One of them is the way I frame my thesis and argument strongly in the introductory paragraph. I feel like I need to be more expressive and clear with my ideas while writing for the audience to understand.

Taking up this course has benefitted me with reaching my audience and connecting with them to reach my purpose. It has clearly helped me with finding the right kind of conventions and format such as the MLA. Writing multiple drafts has improved my overall organization and structure within a paragraph. My English language has certainly improved and I have really enjoyed doing all my assignments and writing my reflections on the weekly blogs posted. I feel that everyone needs to learn this course as English is an integral part of our daily lives.

 

Thank you,

Vishwaja Maheshwaram