My Open Letter

My Adventures Through English 109H

Michael Huebener

To Mr. Bottai and fellow classmates,

July 13th, the day I was dreading for months to come. I had previously attempted English 109H in the spring semester last year, with disastrous results. I was never a good writer; my writing assignments seemed to always turn from writing to anxiety. I didn’t feel that I had that creative touch that was necessary to be a successful writer and keep my readers engaged. In high school I felt as if I skated by and always relied on other projects and assignments to pick up the low scores of my essays. In a composition-based honors english class, I realized that would not be possible. In the spring semester I ended up dropping 109H with a W grade on my transcript. I could not let that happen again and so I enrolled to make it up over the summer. It was a very smart decision, as I learned a lot about writing processes, revision processes, different genres and their context, and how to put all those together to form a solid, well-written piece.

When the summer course started, I went to drop a class that I was enrolled in during the upcoming fall semester, and ended up accidentally dropping the current summer english class. That was roadblock number one! Luckily, the school, as well as Mr. Bottai were extremely helpful and assisted me in getting back into the class, albeit a few days behind schedule. Mr bottai said, “ I’ll make some inquiries and see if we can get you back in (which I would be hugely in favor of, if that’s what you want).”

Now comes the first assignment, evaluating our writing process. In our first blog post, I wrote, “I am mostly a sequential composer with an emphasis on being a procrastinator.” My weaknesses were that I almost always waited until the last day to compose a draft of essays, and would hastily revise it once and then proceed to turn it in. That didn’t work out so well for me, as I received C’s and B’s on all my papers in high school, never an A. I wanted to change that this year, and the required assignments in this course helped me do so. For our first project, a QRG, I drafted my first copy and originally had planned to revise it slightly and turn it in, because that was what I was used to doing. After drafting my first copy, it was time for the peer review process. Nicole provided great feedback in her comments on my draft and made me realize that this was my opportunity to change my writing process and become a better writer. I changed this, I changed that, and voila, I had a final QRG that was much cleaner and well-written than my original draft. The QRG genre was very fun to write in, in my opinion. I had never done that before, as I focused mostly on standard 5-paragraph essays in high school. I found it interesting to break out of my comfort zone, learn the conventions of the genre, and successfully write in it. I always felt that I was adequate at informing audiences on an issue, as it was rather easy to list facts and evidence, so I enjoyed the project one.

Moving onto project two, the anxiety began to rise. I really felt as if I was in over my head and after reading the guidelines, could only imagine what challenges the next two projects would bring. I began to feel uncomfortable and worried that I would not be able to successfully analyze an author’s rhetorical strategies. I still didn’t even fully understand what a rhetorical strategy was! After spending two days just trying to find an article that would fit the requirements of this project, I found myself summarizing more than I was analyzing; falling into the trap of high school writing. This project is where the peer review process really helped me, from my peers’ comments on my draft, and from being an editor myself. Jason provided excellent feedback for me to improve my analysis on, and it helped greatly. Reading and making comments on my peers’ drafts also helped me realize mistakes that I was making myself.  Another aspect that really made me turn into a heavy reviser for this project was the requirement that we had to completely redo our introduction and conclusion. Upon completing the revision process, my anxiety decreased and I felt that my final copy was much improved. While not doing as successful on the rhetorical analysis as I did on the QRG grade wise, it was valuable to me to learn the new genre of analyzing and the conventions that went along with it. I was not familiar with that before taking this course, and 109H changed that.

Beginning project three, I was more confident than I was on the previous two. We were on the home stretch of completing this course and I could see the finish line! I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were able to pick our own genre and decide for ourselves how we wanted to complete the project. This let me unleash the minimal creativity that I had, and I really enjoyed the outcome! I used prezi for my public argument, so while I cannot show you a draft, my final version came out exactly how I wanted it. In the instructions, we were told to “You should consider the genres you encountered throughout your research as “examples” for this project.” During all of my research for the controversy surrounding the legalization of marijuana, 75% of the articles I read were news articles published in national news outlets. I wanted to mimic this appearance and create a newspaper article for my public argument, and prezi gave me the power to do that.

Now that I’m on the victory lap of this course, I can look back and reflect on how I have improved and where I have not improved. I feel that my writing process has turned into a heavy reviser, a needed improvement from my procrastinating ways. I found that planning heavy and revising heavy resulted in higher grades for my projects, while doing one copy without major revisions resulted in a low grade (project 3). The procrastinating approach did not work for this course, and I am going to evolve my writing and focus solely on heavy planning and revising over the next few years and in my other classes. I feel that I have the knowledge to go through with this change, and it needs to happen in order to be successful later in life with my career. While learning a lot over the past 5 weeks, I do feel as though I am still in the process of learning all of the clarity topics and incorporating them into my writing. I do not want to be viewed as a 30-year old who cannot properly compose a piece of writing, so I am going to take the skills and information I learned in this class, and always go back on it when I have to write in the future.

A happy student,

Michael Huebener

Flickr. The harder the battle, The sweeter the victory, March 4, 2013, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic