Dear reader,

I am writing this letter to show what I have learned this semester as well as my

accomplishments in literacy and writing. When I started this semester, I was immediately told

about the various writing assignments, essays and readings that I would have to complete. I

immediately felt overwhelmed since I have always struggled with writing, especially when it

came to writing essays and research papers. If only I could go back and tell myself that these

assignments were not so bad, as long as I managed my time wisely. Throughout this letter, I will

explain how I have grown as a writer and thinker.

In the beginning of the semester, Professor Muesing would assign various reading

assignments from the book “Composing: A Journal By Writers For Writers”. With this, we

would reflect on what we read in our writers notebook and then discuss that in class the next day.

Professor Muesing also assigned for us to do a travel project in which we chose any place that

we wanted to visit and created a brief research essay. As a class we would revise each others

essays and give feedback. I thought these peer review workshops were very helpful and played a

big part in helping me improve as a writer.

I would say that my most important work throughout this course has been my extended

inquiry project. This assignment taught me a lot about the research process and how to focus on

one topic for an extended period of time. In the beginning of the semester, we were taught that

the library website has a database specifically for conducting research. This database allows you

to search through thousands of articles, documents, journal entries and websites to find exactly

what you need. Before this class, I was unaware of the various resources we have access to as a
student of the university. These resources allowed me to successfully complete my research and

expand my knowledge on Dementia.

As I have mentioned numerous times, one of my biggest struggles as a student is writing

research papers and essays. I have a very difficult time putting my thoughts into words. Although

the EIP slightly helped me overcome this struggle, I believe this will remain a challenge for me

in the future. Another weakness I have is making connections between different topics or ideas.

One of my strengths that I discovered throughout this semester is that it's easier for me to write

about a topic that is related to my major. For example, I believe that completing the EIP was

easier for me because it related to my major therefore it was easier to retain the information. If I

had to read or learn about a topic that I am completely uninterested in, then I struggle with

paying attention, retaining the information and putting my thoughts into words. A second

strength I would say that I have is being creative. For example, in the beginning of the semester

we had to create an “I Am From” poem telling about where we are from. I finished this

assignment very quickly and I really enjoyed the creative aspect that it had.

The five SLOs that we learned this semester are; rhetorical knowledge, critical reading,

composing process, knowledge of conventions and critical reflection. I believe that I have grown

in multiple areas as a writer and thinker. With rhetorical knowledge, I learned how to

accommodate my writing to fit my audience. For example, my EIP used various medical words

and in order to help my audience understand the information, I included definitions to those

words. With critical reading, I was able to grow in my ability to use a wide range of texts such as

research journals, documents and articles to compose my EIP. And finally, I found improvement
in the area of critical reflection. For example, after reflecting on my writing from the beginning

of the semester, I feel that it was very vague and lacked details.

I believe that throughout this course, I became more disciplined as a writer and thinker.

As I mentioned in the beginning of the semester, I had a very difficult time dealing with

procrastination. I quickly learned that in order to be a successful writer, you have to spend time

on your work. I learned that your assignments reflect how much work you put into them and the

more time you spend on an assignment, the better the grade. The assignment that caused me to

have this epiphany is the annotated bibliography. I made the mistake of pushing off that

assignment until two days before I had to turn it in. I made this assignment very difficult because

I had to go through and re-read each website so I could create my annotations and spend more

time than needed on each website. This problem could have completely been avoided had I

created the annotations as I finished reading through the first time.

The main assignments that we were to focus on this semester included a topic proposal,

annotated bibliography, the extended inquiry project and the e-portfolio. I thought that the topic

proposal was a very simple assignment to complete. The only issue I had with the topic proposal

was deciding on what topic I wanted to research for this whole semester. If I am honest, I

procrastinated on starting the annotated bibliography until the very last minute, which made the

process more difficult than it was. If I could go back, I would have started the assignment as

soon as I had received it. For a first draft of my EIP, I made an outline in a google doc of how I

wanted my website to be formatted and what details I wanted to include. After receiving

feedback, I went through my website and added additional information, fixed many grammatical

errors and changed the layout of my text. I thought the e-portfolio was the easiest assignment
thus far since the materials incorporated within the e-portfolio were already finished. Overall, I

enjoyed going through my writer's notebook to reflect on previous assignments and to see how

I've grown as a writer.

Moving forward, I will continue working to improve my writing and thinking abilities. In

future classes, I will try to incorporate the 5 SLOs in any way possible. In future research, I will

consider the process that I used for the EIP and utilize the research database provided by the

university. I've really enjoyed this class.

Sincerely,

Savannah Martin