Dear Jane, 

From the moment I learned how to write, I never stopped. I love to read, and that inspires me to write even more. Coming into Writing for Humanity and Arts, I knew there would be a lot of writing involved, but the class turned out to be different from what I had imagined. I expected to read various articles and books and participate in peer reviews. However, I never expected to have to remember the names of publishers and authors. Additionally, peer review was different from what I was used to, I had never received a paper with specific questions to answer before. From my first major essay to my last, I noticed a shift in my writing. At first, I followed the rubric, but over time, my writing evolved as I received more feedback from both my peers and you. My goal overall was to experiment with different writing styles than how I started at the beginning of the semester. 

Throughout our time in class, I received many resources and help, such as from Professor Cohn from the CCNY Library. It helps a lot to learn how to find websites that were written by scholars and, in general, how to find websites that would back up our claim. Also, I learned that a title plays a very important role in the essay because it captures the audience’s attention, and that is our main goal. To know how to capture an audience and to know who are audience is. I want to add on also, the article, First Shiity Draft by Anne Lamott, was really helpful because it’s better to get everything down on your first draft and to edit and work around it to get a good essay. My essay process was to read the article, or something that revolved around my topic. Then from there I would write my first shitty draft and and revise it and edit it. And after reviewing my peer review comment and your comment, I would go back and fix up my essay. 

Writing different types of genres helps me expand my knowledge and understanding when it comes to writing. From my letter of introduction, telling you all my nickname, to opinion editorial, allow me to express my feeling on a topic and getting an experience of how it is to be a publisher even though my article probably won’t be pblishes anytime in the future…, to a visual essay, turing my essay into a video, which was completely new to me. And, it can show me a different way of expression and lead to the critical review essay, which was quite difficult to write, but both my peers’ comments and your comments helped me fix up my essay. Such as a comment from you was “see if you can spend less time on explaining the story and more on what you liked about the series.” Seeing my first draft for the critical review, I was just talking way too much about the show and describing and spoiler the show too much for the reader. After receiving my comment from my peer and your comment, I changed it up and wrote what I love about the show and added evidence to back up my claim. An example, “Also, I love how in the show they included that even in an apocalypse, humans are still the same.” I enjoy writing this essay out of all of them because it was something fun and a topic I love. And to the final essay, I found this one also quite hard because I wanted to write a short story, but I struggled to get where I wanted the story to go, but overall I would say I’m proud of how I did my story because it was my first tine writing a short story. 

Overall, coming into Writing for Humanity and Arts, you were able to show me different types of genres. I’m glad that we also did peer review in class because it also shows me my classmates’ writing style and how differently everyone writes, and to be able to get different opinions rather than just sticking with one peer. A major outcome that I take from this class is to know who I want my audience to be and what tone I want to use. Also, an interesting title can capture the reader’s attention. I’m so happy to have taken this class, because it expanded my knowledge in writing, but I think I’m also gonna need a break from writing now.   Thank You!

From,

Rosie