Reflection on Open Letter Draft

In this blog post, I will be answering some questions from A Student's Guide To First-Year Writing about the open letter draft I just wrote.

"Kittens Wallpaper". Via Fanpop. Public Domain License.

I peer reviewed Stef's open letter draft.

1. I feel like I demonstrated my ability to reflect and think about my writing doing this draft. I went over past blog posts and thought about how I have or have not changed in my opinion.

2. Yes I did provide analysis of my writing experiences by talking about my high school english classes and comparing them to this english course.

3. Concrete examples that I put in were in the form of quotations when I was discussing how my writing process changed over the semester. I could definitely put some more quotes in to add more examples though.

4. I didn't directly say "this is why I did X, Y, and Z", however my analysis of the course included what I was thinking and how I felt about certain assignments and the course layout in general. So, I'd say that counts as an explanation.

5. I used a lot of concepts related to organization and the conventions of writing a letter when making this draft. After I wrote down all of my main thoughts and ideas, I went back and read what I wrote and moved a lot of full paragraphs around to make it an easier read. Also, I kept in mind what sort of language I should be using in this genre.

6. Doing this writing assignment engaged habits like avoiding procrastination which I learned how to do during this course actually.

7. Challenges I face while writing this assignment included sitting down and taking the time to look back over all of the blog posts we've done this semester because it was kind of tedious, especially when I knew that I wasn't going to be talking about even half of them.

8. I can use my time management skills and brainstorming to help me with future writing assignments. They will allow me to work more efficiently and manage my stress level and work load as well.

Draft of Open Letter

In this blog post, I will be sharing my rough draft of the open letter for our final. In addition, I'll be telling what my peers should look for when peer reviewing this.

I would really like my classmates to look at the length of my letter and see if it's appropriate or not. Also, the introduction sounds a little confusing to me because I feel like I'm jumping from thought to thought with no clear focus, so help with that would be much appreciated!!

Here is the link to my draft.

Reflecting More On My Writing Process

In this blog post, I will be answering questions in order to reflect on my writing process even further.

"Golden Retriever Puppies". 12/26/09 via Flickr. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

1. Towards the beginning of the semester, I really just struggled getting the motivation to do all of the blog posts; at times they felt really tedious and unnecessary. Making the first draft of the projects was also hard because I actually had to put all of my brainstorming in the blog posts to use.
2. I learned that I can actually manage my time better than I ever have before and that my writing skills always have room for improvement and I feel like they definitely have improved this semester.
3. Genre refers to the style of writing to use (tone, sentence structure, etc.) as well as keeping in mind the audience and purpose of the piece being written. Understanding what a genre is will help you better communicate with your specific audience which is what essentially makes your writing leave an impact on people.
4. Because I'm an engineering major, writing isn't going to be a huge part of my major. However, the writing skills I developed will help when writing up reports as well as researching topics.
5. My most effective writing moment was when I was revising my final draft for project 2. I was just really focused and I ended up doing really good on it so that made me happy:)
6. My least effective moment was the entire week of deadline 2 because I barely did any of the work in a timely fashion and I also didn't follow the conventions of blogging so I got bad grades on those.

Revisiting My Writing Process

In this blog post, I will be reflecting on my writing process and how it has or has not changed over the course of the semester.


I feel as though overall, I am the same kind of writer in the sense that I still write how I speak which makes it pretty easy for me to get my point across (most of the time). However, my actual writing process has definitely changed a bit. In my blog post entitled "My Writing Process" from the beginning of the year, I wrote that "I am definitely a heavy reviser" with components from "procrastination and heavy planning". But looking back, I did the bulk of the work for the 3 projects in the very first draft so heavy revising wasn't really necessary. The first project definitely included a lot of procrastination and not so much heavy planning. As the semester progressed, the procrastination isn't a super big component of my writing process anymore (thank god!!).

"Cutest Little Cub". 7/13/15 via Flickr. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

It took me a while to get into the swing of things after looking back at my blog post entitled "Calendar Reflection" which is why the procrastination was so prominent with project 1. About half way through the semester, I definitely started following the calendar I planned on at the beginning of the year. My time management has improved because I really had no choice, there's always something to do so it was easy to keep myself busy. This really made my stress level decrease because I always felt better after getting things done little by little. I'm hoping to improve my self motivation skills (it's still a struggle sometimes), but in the next 2-3 years I think I'm going to be really good at it.