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Jason Nadler

Katya Lopatko

Writing 2 Section 1600

15 June 2023

Reflective Letter

When I first started this class at the beginning of the quarter I absolutely hated writing

papers. It didn’t really matter what the topic was or the word count requirement, I did not like

writing one bit. However, I would say that after finishing this course, I have developed a

newfound respect for writing as a whole. I feel much more confident in my ability to create a

piece of work that can accurately portray the information that I want to convey in my writing. A

huge reason as to why I feel so confident in my abilities now, more so than I did before, was

because of the two major writing projects that we had completed over the course of the class.

When I was able to receive feedback from my peers while I was working on my first

draft for the writing projects, I felt that I could actually see where there were errors in my writing

or if there were certain suggestions that they made that I thought would be sensible to add to my

work in order to better the quality of the work I was producing. Although the peer reviewing was

helpful, some of the most prevalent feedback I received was during a conference I had with our

instructor, Katya, who I met with to discuss how to revise my first writing project. Her advice

about talking about the implications of my research regarding public health economics rather

than just stating that it was an important topic to care about led me to discover that there may be

some political motivations behind parts of the academic article I had based my project on and

how talking about said motivations would eventually lead to me creating a more fleshed-out

piece. I believe that this was a huge turning point for me because, when comparing my revisions
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for the first writing project versus the ones for the second project, the notes I was given for the

second one were more a matter of fixing grammatical errors and small structural issues, which I

took as a huge indicator that the content met my goal of being clear and concise. This differed

from the notes I received for my first ever writing project, which were more about enhancing the

content produced within my genre translation and the reflection of why my chosen genre, a

TikTok, worked best to convey my message. While my two projects are nowhere near perfect, I

think that learning how to express a point and the implications of these ideas is such an important

skill that can be applied to all parts of my life and I can now say that I am more effective in my

communication as a result of this.

Even though the feedback I received from my peers and instructor were extremely

beneficial to my growth as a writer, I would argue that the in-class discussions are where I

learned the most about the different elements that make a piece of writing incredible. Talking

about the implications of the “little green ball” from Reid’s “Ten Ways to Think About Writing”

got me thinking about the importance of specificity in writing(Reid pg 6). Before this reading

and discussion, my belief was that the small details in pieces of literature were fluff, or

meaningless and only put in to increase the page counts of books, but since reading Reid’s piece,

I have a much different understanding of what these details really mean. Another great example

of simplicity being a great teacher was a short section of writing titled, “Shitty First Drafts”. This

piece, written by Anne Lamott, highlights the importance of feeling stuck in your writing and

counteracts this by claiming, “You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something

–anything–down on paper.” as a way of crafting a makeshift call to action to the readers in order

to help them overcome their writing block(Lamott pg 25). This resonated immensely with me

because I have always felt that I struggled to begin an essay because I had no idea what to talk
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about, so the fact that an accomplished writer normalized this issue made me feel less hopeless in

this scenario because I now know that the first draft is meant to be bad and you’re supposed to

learn from it. This message along with this claim from “Navigating Genres” explains, “In other

words, knowing what a genre is used for can help people to accomplish goals,...by writing an

effective personal statement.” which put into perspective the fact that all writing is goal oriented

and the hardest part is trying to figure out what that goal is and how to accomplish it (Dirk pg

253).

Upon entering this class, I thought that one of my biggest weaknesses, when it comes to

writing, is that I was horrible at identifying and understanding what rhetorical choices were

being made and why they were being made. However, upon further reflection this quarter, I

would argue that my biggest weakness was actually my inability to focus on the implications of

certain choices made by authors. This became apparent during the time I was working on my

first writing project, but as time went on, I made it a point to focus more heavily on the reasons

why authors make the choices that they do, more so than usual, and it has been a tremendous

help. I would even go as far as to claim that it is now one of my strong suits in terms of my

writing capabilities. Although I have made a decent amount of improvement in certain areas,

there are other parts of my writing that still need a good deal of work, specifically speaking about

my ability to structure my papers correctly. While I do believe I have improved this area a bit, I

still think there is a lot more work that I need to do in order to make this specific problem better.

By no means am I someone who enjoys writing, but I do believe that this class has helped

me get through my fear of creating inadequate work and instead has turned me into a more

capable writer. Instead of dreading writing this reflective letter, I felt pretty confident being able

to talk about my experience with this class and my general writing experience. That being said, I
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am extremely grateful that I learned these new skills because they can be applied to many

different areas of my academic as well as personal career.

Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,
Anchor Books, New York, 2019.

Lowe, Charles, et al. “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College
Writing Student.” Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, Parlor Press,
Anderson, 2010, pp. 6–8.

Lowe, Charles, et al. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, Parlor Press, West
Lafayette, IN, IN, 2010, pp. 249–260.