Reflective Letter 1
Dear Marlen,
I got to say, you were not kidding with the first month of your class being hell. I have never endured this much writing in such a short period of time in my life. Don’t take this wrong way, but it sucked and sucked a lot. I’ve been writing papers I guess since maybe late elementary school and I’ll tell you I disliked writing those paper as much as my most recent ones in your class. All I have been able to do with writing is make it a chore for me. You know one of those annoying chores you get stuck with your whole life, like emptying the trash. That’s what this is for me, and I’m not going to be a Debbie downer about this. I have other reasons and some positive things too that I’ve learned about my writing. I’ve always tried to find some positive out of writing for me besides writing a paper that fits bare requirements and passes. With your class, you’re a tricky sly guy, and don’t really give requirements making every paper topic so broad. At first in class we applied that all to the blogs and workshops and it was hard for me. I hated writing, you didn’t give us anything specific to write about, and so I was just lost. I felt like, shit I’m screwed. My high school gave us no freedom with our writing that I fell like I was trained to only write upon given a topic and its’ requirements. Your class finally broke that for me. Your freedom seemed so hard, but you also pointed out something in a recent class that helped me identify what I like about all this writing. I mentioned or you could get at; I have no motivation for writing. Grammar, what is that? Al though you said you said to us that we can pick our own topics, genre everything so that way we are writing about things we have interests in. If I am picking topics that have no meaning to me, it is just going to be high school all over again, with paper after paper of meaningless topics. I am always going to not like writing papers and doing the editing, but that stuff that comes with college and growing up. Your class gives me the chance to more fully express my mind. We chose everything and your fine with that, and I can put more detailed thought into my writing by picking things I enjoy. This is huge for me, because I left a complement on the question of the week saying something towards the line of your class being my favorite class I had right now. I think that’s a pretty big complement or you’re doing something right. The subject I hate the most is my favorite class at this time and moment, and it’s a weird feeling. This is main point of your class that I learned about my self so far, there are other things too.
It’s hard for me to explain these other points about your class. These other things we’ve learned are helpful but they annoy me at the same time. For instance, I have never annotated or heard of that word before you class. I find that to be helpful and not in different context for a couple reasons. It helps, no doubt about that, I can mark things in my readings that interest me or are important. It highlights those points and makes them easy to find which is really helpful, but on the other hand. It is to time consuming for slow readers like me. I am horrible at analyzing texts, I simply cannot remember 85 percent of anything I read. I did just realize something that cancels this point but still helps. I suck at comprehending my readings but by annotating I’m marking out main point in passages. What ever I have highlighted I can look back on and didn’t notice that until this sentence. What I don’t like about annotating is it just extra work that I wish I did not have to do. Staying on the point of helpful writing techniques, I love the “shitty” first drafts. I know you see our turned in essays as our “shitty” drafts but now before I write anything I free write my own shitty first draft. Some are plain outrageous and the others more mature. I just find it so helpful to be able to go back on something you’ve written and pull ideas from it. Having that base draft done makes building on it a thousands times easier.
So Marlen, this is what I’ve been getting from your class so far. Its fun, you do a good job at letting the students be students in their papers, it’s just a lot of work. It’s all for the better.
Sincerely,
Andrew Singer
