Dear Malcolm, I truly enjoyed my time in your English 1103 class.

I personally feel that, because we had the entire semester to work on our Extended Inquiry Projects, I was able to take more time to sit back and learn how to improve my writing. I have almost always made a habit of putting off assignments until the last minute because Ive been confident enough in my writing that I could easily churn out something and still get a good grade, but the pacing of this course helped to change that. I could have put every assignment off until the last minute, but the time given, the freedom of topic choice, and the ways that our assignments tied back to our projects kept me working at a steady pace, and I think that is an excellent step in the right direction for me. The daybook was one of the aspects of this class that I found most interesting. At first I was skeptical; I was fine with writing about prompts in class, but what would I write about on the days that we didnt have anything assigned? I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I was able to write about my thoughts fairly easily when we didnt have assignments. If all else failed, I doodled (hey, I need somewhere for that!). It also proved itself to be a great place to muse about our writing and progress on whatever assignments were due next. Most of the Informal Writing Assignments I found tedious; the only one that I truly got much use out of was the Search and Rescue assignment for the annotated bibliographies. Well, really, that was tedious as well, but it was a useful sort of tedious, in the same vein as making notecards to study for a test. A necessary evil, if you will. Basically, it was a pain to complete, but once it was done I had all of the resources I might need for my Annotated Bibliography in one concise document.

When I first learned that wed be using the entire semester to work on writing one big paper, I was excited. Partially this was because it meant Id have a lot of time to do my work (and less stress over time constraints), and partially because it meant that Id really get to go deep into the material. When I learned that I could write about almost any topic I wanted, I was ecstatic. I almost instantly knew what I wanted to write about: religion, its backlashes in society, and how it affects us daily within laws and legislature. My main problem was reining it in; religion is a touchy subject with a lot of people, and its also an extremely broad subject. Knowing a rough approximation of what I wanted to write about made coming up with my Topic Proposal easy. I was able to write it out in no time with information I already knew from personal research. The comments I got back were very helpful; I needed to narrow down my topic. Id written my proposal about almost anything on religion. Thats a lot of potential information, and it could have become overwhelming. Before I started on my Annotated Bibliography I narrowed it down to religion in politics: what is separation of church and state, should laws based on religious premises be passable, and does that affect the general majority rule idea? It was very easy to find sources for my Annotated Bibliography. I believe that I only ended up using one from that assignment, though; I was a bit general with the sources I cited, and further narrowed my topic before I wrote my draft for the Extended Inquiry Project. Even so, I think that the Annotated Bibliography was helpful in preparing me to think critically about my sources before using them willy-nilly. Finally, its time to talk about the Extended Inquiry Project itself. I believe that this was both my favorite assignment and the most important one; it is based on researching something that you enjoy or find interesting, and because of that it gives you so much room to improve yourself. Because Im deeply interested in my topic, I had no problem getting motivated to write

it. A good deal of the time I wrote what I knew and then found sources to support it, rather than finding sources and using them to write my paper. I think that this made it easier for me to make the essay my own writing rather than a compilation of material I found online. I still suffered a bit from having simply too much to write about, but I couldnt think of any way to really narrow my topic any further. The only other problem I had was making sure that I kept my writing as unbiased as possible; as Ive said before, religion is an extremely touchy subject, and I wanted to give a relatively neutral view of its roles. I believe that doing peer reviews in a writing-intensive class is an excellent idea. Because I knew that someone other than my teacher would be reading my rough draft, I put extra effort into it. I also enjoyed getting to read other students drafts (the two that I read were very interesting; one was on Adderall, the other on the differences between American and Chinese parenting styles), and I hope that my comments helped them to improve their writing. However, I didnt get much out of my peers reviews; the comments I got in class were sparse, and only one of my partners sent me their typed comments (and even those were lacking in content). Im hoping that that means they didnt find too much to change, but any critique helps to improve myself. After I got my comments back from you I was both pleased and worried; a high grade on a rough draft is both good and bad. On one hand, it means that my writing is strong and that I dont have much to worry about changing for my final draft. On the other hand, I still wanted to improve my writing, and I wasnt given many hints on how to do so. I had to re-read my essay several times and really decide what I was and was not comfortable with changing. In the end, I did fix all of the things that were pointed out to me in your comments, and I also changed some small phrasings that I thought felt clunky. After thinking about it for a while, I have decided that my essay feels complete as it is. There are many more points that I could touch on, but each one

gets farther from my topic, and I think that adding those points would detract from the impact of my writing. I had a great time in your class, Malcolm. It has been a pleasure.

Olivia Eyring