A Letter to My Peers

To my Peers,

    Through this class we have learned a great deal of things from analyzing controversies in our field, analyzing rhetoric from those who are regarded as the best in our field, and even learned how to structure an argument based on a debate in our respective fields.  For only being a month long class we have sure done a lot and like everything in this world, it must come to an end.  As we have done a seemingly extensive amount of reflection in this class, I begin to take a good hard look at my relationship with writing over the past couple of years and look at where I succeeded and where I failed.

For the longest time writing has been a challenge for me.  I hated it and I still don’t like it to this day.  This kind of attitude has always stemmed from my irritation with it.  After so many years of just plain hating writing I learned how to write successfully due to a lot of experiences.  This change started my senior year in AP Literature when my comprehension of writing was tested constantly.  The class was tough and the type of writing asked of us was above and beyond what I expected.  To make it  worse, I was not doing well on my papers.  I could not write successfully until I began to get a better understanding how I write.  I am not the most methodical writer in the world, but when I got down to reading and understanding how others were doing well I began to get writing down to a formula.  The ability to analyze literature and the other skills I learned in that class prepared me for college writing.  

However, as college came around, I became a bit lazy with my class work and my procrastination became worse.  In one of my general education classes in my first semester I had to write an analysis.  I didn't really read the book so I looked at a summary of the book and took some key elements and wrote a paper on it and I got an A.  This style of writing may sometimes work against me, but as I have learned and reinforced in this class, my writing style works for me and it will for the next couple of years. Since that class, I have began to look at my writing and realized that if I put effort into whatever I am writing I can actually do pretty well. In the foreseeable future I will probably procrastinate on most of my papers but I have to learn to not follow this writing process and evolve my writing even more so I can be successful.  In terms of how I felt about this class, I don’t think I would ever want to do it online again.  This subject has to be more personal to me.  Even though peer review helped a lot, I think it would work better in a classroom setting, which I am excited to get back to in about a week and a half.

 Like many of the papers I had to write in this class there will be more ahead.  The papers I have written in this class have freshened my style of writing and will allow me to be more confident in my writing and my writing process.  It was a pleasure to be in this class with such wonderful people and I wish you all the best.

Best Regards,

Adam Karsten