Letter to the Reader

Dear Reader,
This whole semester in college composition has been an amazing experience. Everything I have learned from this class will be with me for the rest of my life. I learned a lot about myself as a writer and believe I have grown as a writer as well. Before this class I don’t think I knew how to properly revise a draft or analyze a draft for one of my peers. This class taught me how to do that affectively and give many people good feedback. With all of the revisions and analysis that we did in class I gradually got better in being able to give my peers feedback that they can use in their paper. Also I was able to take some of the ideas I read in my peer’s papers and incorporate them into some of my own papers. While in college composition I learned many new techniques to use while writing. One in particular that helped me the most was exemplification. Exemplification means to provide examples about something. Writing an exemplification essay typically involves offering many examples to support a generalization about something. It is mainly showing the reader what happened and not telling them. Also with this class I learned a lot about different ways you can create an introduction and conclusion. Before I think I only relied on one way to write these two very important pieces to a paper. Now I have many ways to create great openings and closings to my paper. Some of the different ways I have learned to conclude a paper are reviewing your key points or restating your thesis, prediction, end with a relevant quotation, or evaluate the importance of the essays subject. For introductions you can start with an anecdote, a good question, facts, quotation, and dilemma. With all of these great techniques there are many more that you could add.


Writing in this blog throughout this semester has been a treat! Each and every blog that I have posted is different and has a certain meaning. My very first post was my reflection about the compare and contrast cookie paper. I talked about what our experiment was about and what my paper will include. My second post shows some alternate introductions to this paper, all starting in different ways. I tried to use different techniques that we learned to start our papers to see which one fit my paper the best. My third post is the first draft and analysis of my Seven Deadly Sins essay. Here I tried to analyze how interesting it was for me to create a paper and an analysis on a topic I have never been familiar with, but still trying to make the essay flow. For my fourth draft I posted my revised “Seven Deadly Sins” paper. In this post I tried to expand more on all of the events that happened all throughout my paper. I also wanted to add more details in my introduction and during the events. In my first draft most of the examples were established but I think in this second draft it is clearer with more details. In my fifth post I came up with different conclusions I could use for the deadly sins paper. Each conclusion had a different technique that I had learned about by reading through an article all about conclusions. The sixth post was all about the paper “How to Utilize Your Senior Skip Day” that I had written with Eric and Kelsey. This was a very fun essay to write because there were so many different ways to create this paper. It was fun to analyze the topic together and write the essay. Receiving peer feedback for this essay also helped me understand and analyze revisions we could later incorporate in our draft. In my seventh post I asked Ms. Basko to analyze my character sketch paper because I feel as though it was the draft that had the most meaning to me and it is one that I really wanted to finish on a strong note. Finally with my eighth and final post I had my revised character sketch with all of the feedback Ms. Basko gave to me incorporated into it. Enjoy the blog!
Fred Crilly