Dear Eugene,

This course has helped me improve my writing beyond simply preparing for and

completing projects. For the first time in college, I had a class with under 25 students that were

all engaged in discussion. This was a vastly different experience than sitting in an 800 person

lecture hall listening to a professor on the brink of retirement discuss fossils. Although that’s not

to say that I haven’t truly respected and been intrigued by some of my professors. My point is

that having a class taught entirely by a younger, lighthearted TA creates a much less intimidating

environment. Furthermore, I gained just as much from being in such an environment than I did

from the written content of the course. Coming from a predominantly white, conservative town

in Northern California, I didn’t experience a huge amount of diversity growing up. I’m grateful

that this class provided an open forum for people of different backgrounds to discuss writing.

Where else would I have been inspired by a Swedish exchange student (who I spoke to maybe

twice) to read a memoir by a Vietnamese refugee about his experiences with trauma, addiction,

masculinity, and sexuality?

Show don’t tell. This quarter, I learned to write about what I’m interested in. That’s why I

introduced this letter by talking about diversity and engaging with my peers. For the first time in

a writing class, I was given open-ended prompts. This helped me engage with the course and

develop confidence in my creativity. I feel like writing is, for the most part, pointless and

unenjoyable if you’re not writing about something you are genuinely interested in. Moreover,

taking this class has helped me bring creativity back into my writing, something that was drilled

out of us in high school. The freedom to choose which genre to translate other written work into

was thought-provoking, slightly challenging, and entertaining at times. If I had more time in this
class, creativity is something that I would want to continue to work on. I’ve always been

interested in creative writing, but I’ve never taken a class that taught it.

The primary shift in my thinking about writing has to do with genre. A genre is a

“typified utterance that appears in recurrent situations” and “evolves through” time to transmit

“communicative intentions in fairly stable ways” (Bickmore 2). Writing is purposeful in the

sense that an author is writing within a specific genre, that contains specific conventions, for a

specific audience in order to convey certain information. A genre “evolves” to promote the most

efficient means of communication for a predetermined audience and type of information.

Conventions, such as format, style, tone, and punctuation, make up a genre. These conventions

change as a genre evolves. Prior to this class, I had not considered the reasoning behind different

conventions in different genres.

Furthermore, spending so much time learning about genre has helped me focus on the

importance of the audience of a work. In her article, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward

Rhetorical Analysis,” nonfiction author Laura Bolin Carroll explains that the intended “audience

can determine the type of language used, the formality of the discourse, the medium or delivery

of the rhetoric, and even the types of reasons used to make the rhetor’s argument” (Carroll 49).

Focusing on the intended audience while writing is key to informing the writer’s decisions about

how to convey information. Unfortunately, this has been my greatest weakness in this course.

While working on the two writing projects in this course, I would spend most of my time trying

to figure out how to translate information instead of how to make information understandable to

the audience of the new genre. A lot of the peer feedback I have received has related to this

issue. For example, most of the constructive criticism I received on writing project two was

about uncertainty over the research question and the context behind it. I made this the focus on
my revision. This is another skill that I would continue to work on if I had more time in this

course. Overall, I think having experienced this struggle will help me focus on writing for a

specific audience in the future.

On the other hand, I think my greatest strength in writing this quarter has been

developing an efficient writing process that consists of outlining, freewriting, and revision.

Throughout this course, we learned that “writers work iteratively, composing in a number of

versions, with time in between each for reflection, reader feedback, and/or collaborator

development” (Downs 66). By jotting down the main ideas I want to cover in a paper and then

coming back to freewrite a draft of it after a day or two, I’m able to approach the prompt with

fresh ideas. I usually spend a lot of time writing about things I hadn’t even written down in my

outline. I’ve had a lot of success in choosing to freewrite only when I am in the right state of

mind for it. As explained in Peter Elbow’s article “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing,”

such “unplanned narrative and descriptive exploratory writing (or speaking) will almost

invariably lead the [writer] spontaneously to formulate conceptual insights that are remarkably

shrewd” (Elbow 37). By not forcing myself to write when I don’t want to, I am able to truly

explore my mind when I do. On another note, the third step of my writing process (revision) has

been helped a lot through peer and instructor feedback. Thanks for all your hardwork Eugene; I

appreciate you making the classroom environment welcoming.

Sincerely,

Nick
 Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)systems.”

Open English @ SLCC, Pressbooks.

Carroll, Laura B. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis.” Writing

Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 45-58.

Downs, Doug. “Revision is Central to Developing Writing.” Naming What We Know, edited by

Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University Press, 2015, pp. 66-67.

Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Writing by Teaching Thinking.” Change, vol. 15, no. 6, Heldref

Publications, 1983, pp. 37-40.