Dear California Botanical Society,

Remember when I told you I had a fascination with flowers. We argued for some time
about it because I said there’s no such thing as an ugly flower and you decided to look up the
weirdest flowers that I didn’t even know existed. Well, I came across a few a while back.
2016.but they were flowers I’d never seen before. I thought it’d be fun to share this with you
because your major is in Ag. Sciences.
The first one was found in California. Not the first flower,just the first one they
mentioned. The ​Elatine Americana. ​It’s not a newly documented flower, there were more
discoveries made for it. Originally, they thought it was native to California, but it just happened
to be the most westward location these flowers had been discovered. They also apparently
sometimes got it confused with another flower, ​Elatine Ambigua. ​But it’s also found in
Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi and a lot more states. Basically everywhere. It’s a cute little
plant, I’ll put some pictures of it. Very tiny, like 5 cm tall. Max. And they’ve got the cutest little
pinkish flowers. We should try and find some.
The next one is from New Mexico, found near the Rio Grande. ​Cyperus glomeratus. ​It’s
found all over Europe and Asia, so it’s definitely not native. How it got to New Mexico they
don’t know. It’s a very fast growing species, so it definitely could be considered invasive
because it also caused some problems. It apparently can CREATE wetlands with its growth.
They don’t explain how but it’s definitely something to look into. It’s also kind of funny too.
They look like thistles. But they’re not as green as Russian thistles, they look very dried out and
are just as tall. At least you can’t accidentally step on these like you did in Oregon while walking
barefoot.
Wyoming. The data for Wyoming is from National Park Service units, which is kind of
cool because I know your grandmother was a park ranger. But the flower from this state is the
Alliaria Petiolata. ​Another very cute, dainty flower. It’s a very tall plant for small flowers. Kind
of like mustard flowers except they are white and a lot less dense. The leaves look like rose
leaves and there are more of those than there are flowers. It’s a perennial flower which is nice
like roses. It’s mostly in Nebraska and Utah. Another plant from Wyoming is the ​Conysa
ramosissima. ​If you let it get out of control it’s like a rosemary bush with dandelion flowers, but
not the yellow ones. The ones where you blow on it and they get everywhere. It’s also a native
perennial. There’s not much else on the Wyoming ones.
But I hope you like these plants, or at least found them interesting. Maybe next time I
look up plants from Oregon so we can identify all the ones we found while walking through
dried-up Lake Prairie under the Milky Way. We gotta make that trip again with Phil Tonne and
Bonnie Heidel. Okay that’s all. Vibe on Brother.

With lots of love,

Hamis Razifar

P.S We’re bringing Bowie next time.

 A Letter to My Best Friend

Genres as learned in elementary school can be known as different book categories, but

it’s not just limited to types of books. Multitudes of different genres can be identified in

everyday life, from billboard signs along the road to emails from professors. With a little work,

each of those genres can be translated into another. I decided to translate an excerpt from a 2016

Research Journal, ​Madrono, i​ nto a letter to one of my closest friends. The excerpt from the

journal focused on different plants documented in the states of California, New Mexico, and

Wyoming. Since most letters to a friend are personal and informal, as I was writing this one I

found that it was easy to write to him about said new information. The personal nature of letters

makes it easy to convey information in a quick and easy sense while making it fun for both the

writer and receiver.

Letters have always been a common mode of communication; writing one is easy to do

for anyone. A greeting at the very beginning of the letter clearly notes who the letter is for no

matter how publicized the letter is. At the end of the letter there is a sign off, typically signed by

the author in whichever way they please. Translating this journal into a letter almost seemed too

easy. I found myself applying the writing techniques Peter Elbow mentions in ​Teaching Thinking

by Teaching Writing. I​ started off writing the letter as if I was writing to one of my closest

friends who is an Agricultural Sciences major, which seemed fitting. But then came the actual

translating where I had to incorporate the actual aspects of the journal. In this case I switched the

author from me to one of the authors of the journal and I chose to make my salutation personal

“with lots of love”. If I had begun writing as if I were Hamid Razifar, the letter might not even

exist because I do not know him. Right from the get go of the letter any reader can see that it is

for the California Botanical Society (they published the journal); the reader can assume that they
know one another, but they would not know until they read the letter. These are components that

are typically found on every single letter, but they do not necessarily concern the subject being

translated (if being translated).

Immediately after the greeting in the letter, I start talking about a memory I had, an

anecdote that relates to the coming topic of discussion. “I had a fascination with flowers”. The

excerpt ​Noteworthy Collections ​talks about flowers and plants that are found throughout the

United States. I was able to elaborate on the story and connect it to the journal I intended on

translating. Although the writer in the letter is not me, I kept the personal anecdotes and

pretended that Razifard had experienced those things to maintain the informal lighthearted tone

found in letters between friends. The anecdotes are found in the beginning and end of the letters

to maintain the contents to be the literal centerpiece of the letter. Not only do the stories serve as

a way to keep the letter from sounding formal, it fulfills another important component that is a

letter often refers to past events that are important to both sides.

On the topic of past events, letters often refer to events that the receiver may not have

experienced with the author and the author feels that the event is so meaningful that they can

describe it in such a way that the receiver may feel that they’ve experienced it. That can be seen

in the actual translated contents of the journal. ​Noteworthy Collections​ is clearly broken up into

three parts. Plants from California, Wyoming, and New Mexico. The middle three paragraphs of

the letter are broken up as such and contain similar information. Each section of the journal

describes the flower/plant itself, discusses where they were found, and what previous botanists

implied about the plant. All the information remained the same, however, the journal was cited

with various sources of information. In the letter, I left out all of the outside sources, but they
could have been incorporated by saying “ [name] told me that...” or “I read from [article name]

that...”.

I was able to put the general information of each fact into the body paragraphs in a very

simplified way, and that is one of the beauties to personalized letters. It can be written in any

writing style you choose. I wrote in both complete and incomplete sentences, sentence

fragments, and I could’ve written run on sentences if I choose. I capitalized words I wanted to be

emphasized and if I were to be physically writing this letter I would write the species names in

cursive. I left out the very specific information that I believed was not needed such as “about 300

[miles] NE of parking lot 10” (Razifad). Although I wrote the letter as if I were writing to my

close friend, if I were to truly embody Hamid Razifard and his colleagues I would not be writing

in incomplete sentences and saying “Vibe on Brother” to the California Botanical Society.The

most important part is that a personal letter is tailored to the author and receiver, not anyone else.

I never thought it would be fun to read a scientific journal about flowers, even if I was

passionate about it. There was a lot of information I really was not interested in, but being able to

tell a friend about it made the translation very fluid. Letters have a lot of versatility when it

comes to the writing style within it. As long as it has the greeting and sign-off, it is automatically

considered a letter. But when that personal touch is added (most likely by speaking in the first

person), that is when it really ​feels l​ ike a letter. The ease of writing personal letters definitely

draws from Elbow’s ideas on first order thinking where it has almost no structure to it and there

is no worry about formality. And postscripts are fun too, I believe they are a neat way to

incorporate anything else the author may be feeling but is completely unrelated to the topic of the

letter.
 Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing.” ​Change,​ vol. 15, no. 6, 1983, pp.

37–40. ​JSTOR​, www.jstor.org/stable/40164191. Accessed 3 Nov. 2020.

Razifard, Hamid, et al. “NOTEWORTHY COLLECTION.” ​Madroño​, vol. 63, no. 1, 2016,

pp. 3–7. ​JSTOR​, www.jstor.org/stable/44577574. Accessed 3 Nov. 2020.