Landrethsmith 1

Austin Landrethsmith

Samantha Gonzalez

ENC 1101

9 November 2023

Response Letter

Dear Sam,

I appreciate the time you took to look over and give constructive feedback on the work I did for

Major Assignment Two. It appeared that after the initial draft, I needed improvements on some

aspects of the paper. With this letter I am writing to you, I will provide in detail how the

feedback I got on this assignment influenced me to go back and revise what I had done.

For Major Assignment Two, the one of the most impactful criticisms I was given related to my

thesis statement. After reading my paper for the first time, you stated that there was no thesis

statement at the end of my introduction. This was tough to hear since I did have a sentence that I

originally thought would be suitable for a thesis. This comment helped me to realize that my

original statement, “To apply these ideas to my own experiences, being a part of a Miami Heat

group chat on Twitter or “X” and being a part of the gym community with my friends can be

examples of discourse communities.”, did not effectively describe the main idea of what I was

going to write about in the rest of the paper. To reflect on this, I went back to the original

directions of the assignment and saw that the objective was to analyze how literacy affects our

lives using examples from my own life. In order to actually hit the mark with my thesis and

better represent the point of Major Assignment Two I added the sentence “The influence of
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writing in discourse communities, demonstrated by my participation in group chats within the

Miami Heat Twitter fandom and gym community, can show the impact of written

communication on our lives socio-culturally”. With adding this statement I effectively

summarized how my experiences of being a part of certain discourse communities displayed how

writing affects my way of life.

Again for Major Assignment Two, another piece of feedback that helped me improve my paper

had to do with my first example of a discourse community. Following your skimming of my

assignment you said that “ You did not convince me that you met the goal of explaining how this

is an example of a discourse community”. Obviously this is something I did not want to be told

since I had initially thought my example would fit the explanation of what a discourse

community is. But I knew I needed to actually take your feedback into consideration since I

wanted to get the full understanding of the main objective of the assignment and get the best

grade possible. To fix the example I decided to mention the fact that I am part of a Miami heat

Twitter group chat which showed that I am in a very specific group within the fandom. By

adding this I demonstrated that I engage in a small online group within a fanbase in a very

populous app. This shows that I have a shared common interest with a limited group of people

which effectively describes what being part of a discourse community is like.

With writing this letter, I aimed to show you that I was able to make the proper changes to Major

Assignment Two. Using the feedback I received, I went back and added an acceptable thesis

statement and a conventional example for a discourse community on Major Assignment Two. I

had hoped that you considered these changes to be sufficient enough to make these papers the

best possible.
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Thank you,

Austin Landrethsmith