Dear Ron Christiansen,
I have learned a lot within the past semester for not only English itself but writing as
well. I used to love writing and high school demolished that, within this semester I learned to
love it again. The biggest help within the semester was not only the instructors, but was the book
you had your students get for this class. It taught me things that I never knew about English and I
learned a lot from it.
One thing that helped me a lot was learning that there are other point of views that will be
looking within my paper and I needed to figure out who my audience was. Within my narrative
essay the audience was anyone who wanted to read it, but since we did it in an English class it
was the teacher and class mates. To me it was like a blog about myself, whoever wanted to read
and learn about other people and their lives read it. This was my favorite essay to write and to
read from the other student. My Rhetorical Analysis essay was difficult, but a good
accomplishment. The audience for this essay was anyone who loved books. I chose the Books
Make You a Boring Person paper, it was posted within the New York Times so not only was the
audience for book lovers but also for people who read the New York Times. My Issue
Exploration essay was definitely the hardest for me. I found that the audience for that essay
could be anyone. It is on medical marijuana so it goes to doctors, patients, government officials,
and your average person; but the main audience would be the people looking for the use of
medical marijuana like patients and doctors. The audience is a huge help to the paper, once you
figure out the audience you figure out how your voice should be in your paper.
One of the best readings that helped me this semester was the Shitty First Drafts. That
taught me to just get everything in mind down on my first rough draft and not care what others
think about my paper. The next drafts were to get everything in order from what I jotted down.
At first I hated it when people marked up my paper, this semester taught me to love it. In my
Narrative essay I wanted to make my reader enjoy my paper and not be able to stop reading it,
that would be my accomplishment to that essay. For my revisions I had to think of my audience
and think of different ways to grasp my readers attention. In my revision I listened to me peer
readers comments on what would help my essay be better and the marks that you left on my
paper I also wanted to use a lot of adjectives to paint pictures in my readers head. By the end of
my revisions I thought I did exactly that. When it came to my rhetorical analysis essay I just
jotted down what I thought of the paper, I had a difficult time with this paper. When it came to
fixing up the paper I needed to critic the author a bit more and full understand what she was
saying within her paper. The hardest part wasn’t the revisions but understanding what the author
was talking about, by the end of my revisions I got what she was talking about and able to make
a pretty decent paper. The issue exploration was by far the hardest. There is so much information
you can use and it can make you get lost- which happened to me. My first draft was a mess and it
came to be scrambles of stuff on my paper about the topic I chose. Eventually by the end of my
revisions I was able to puzzle my way through and make a paper that wasn’t a mess. Chapter
thirteen helped guide me on this essay and make it more appealing to my reader. I feel like I
could constantly revise this paper because there is so much information on it, but I got to the end
of the process.
I grew a lot as a writer in this semester. I went from hating English and writing to loving
it again. I realized how much we use writing in every day ways and all the different things we
can do with it. I began to love to hear others peoples point of views and have them mark up my
papers. The more marks people made, the better my paper would be. I learned how to make a
good paper and not everyone is perfect at writing even the professional authors. I hope to
continue my writing skills as I grow older. I figured out that a blog would be the best way to go
for my writing career.
Thank you for a great semester,
Makayla Peterson