Dear Professor Feldman,

Throughout my time in this course I have went on to realize more and more just how

much I have truly grown as a writer. Before this class I was not too confident in my writing, I

never had that feeling of confidence instilled in me when submitting a final paper. As time went

by in this course, the more project builders and writing projects we completed as a class, the

more confidence I began to gain in my writing ability. I began to notice that I was not the only

one struggling with the writing, I noticed more and more how writing is a long, time consuming

process. I had always thought of my writing to be very weak and difficult to understand, I now

see that the main reason for this was because of the fact I didn’t know how to approach the tasks

or prompts I was assigned. I would read the prompt and try my best to answer the prompt for the

next few sentences, then venture off into completely unrelated and irrelevant topics. I often

found myself writing with really no direction or end goal, which is why my papers were always

very confusing and overall poorly done.

After doing certain reading such as “How to Read Like a Writer” by Mike Bunn I began

to grasp at a more concrete understanding of how and more importantly why authors wrote the

way they did. For example I realized and picked up on how certain authors aimed to appeal to

different audiences by writing their content a certain way, whether it’d be phrased a certain way

or simply favoring one group over another. I even took note of the strategies authors used and

began to implement those same strategies into my own writing. After reading and thoroughly

understanding that paper, I started to approach the readings I was assigned differently, to my

surprise I was understanding the content a lot better, and I was even picking up on certain
rhetorical strategies that different authors use to cater to their very own rhetorical situations. This

was the start of my newly learned way of thinking, reading, and writing.

After beginning to approach all my assignments with this thought process I began to ask

myself a series of questions, which finally began to give me direction in terms of where I was

going with my papers. The ideas I would gather from this new method was similar to that of a

brainstorm, I felt like I always had something to write about and began to find myself less and

less stuck without anything to write. Previously in highschool I disliked writing, mainly because

I never really knew what I was doing. After taking this course and gaining confidence in my

writing ability, I have began to genuinely enjoy writing and the long process that comes along

with it. I realized that you should never expect a first draft to be perfect, but as long as you keep

making revisions and edits, the paper will surely improve. I feel I have grown tremendously as a

writer this quarter.

While taking the Writing 2 course I have learned all kinds of things, from how to better

analyze a piece of writing, identifying rhetorical devices, genres, rhetorical situations, discourse

communities, and many more. I learned an abundance of new vocabulary words and strategies to

apply to my writing or analyzing in the future. For example one very useful thing I learned is

how one single topic can be talked about or discussed in many different genres. What allows this

to happen are the different genres that give those certain genres their characteristics, these are

called conventions. Different genres can share conventions, but not all conventions can be

utilized in all rhetorical situations. There are genres and conventions that are more appropriate in

certain rhetorical situations than others.

 I had absolutely no clue what a discourse community was before this class, in fact

hearing it for the first time was quite scary. I was glad to find that I was not the only one among

my peers to be clueless as to what the word meant. I learned a lot of useful terms in this class that

I will for sure be using in my future work here at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Going into rhetorical situations, I learned that for every rhetorical situation there was an

appropriate approach to take when writing in the context of that rhetorical situation. For example

you can not write to a teacher using the same tone, diction, and attitude as you would if you were

writing to your best friend in a text message. The rhetorical situations are completely different

which call for a different approach for example, the rhetorical situation of you writing to a

teacher calls for a more professional approach. Learning the ways to approach different

rhetorical situations is a great skill I gained while taking the Writing 2 course. There was even

some things I unconsciously did without even realizing. For example, I realized that I would use

certain rhetorical strategies in different aspects of my writing to better suit a rhetorical situation,

after becoming aware of this, and combing the newly acquired knowledge I found myself writing

in such a manner that was better suited for my intended audience. I began to grasp an

understanding of how to appeal to a specific audience.

Realizing that using discipline specific diction was essential helped me tremendously.

After learning that discourse communities expect you to use discipline specific diction/jargon

when writing for the scholars within that discourse community, I began to utilize this strategy

more and in turn it paid off. I will be applying a lot of the things I learned throughout this quarter

to my future work by maintaining the same approach to new pieces of writing I am assigned to

read. The series of questions I ask myself when reading a new piece of writing is going to keep
me on track and aid me in quickly finding the main points of the writing and the author’s

purpose.

One of my favorite assignments throughout the course is definitely Writing Project 3.

This writing project really gave me the freedom to do really anything I wanted with a piece of

academic writing. Being able to translate the scholarly article to a more informal form of writing

was fun and really gave me a break from the typical paper. I am glad to have taken this course

this quarter, I feel that my analysis skills have improved greatly. I always struggled with

analyzing pieces of writing effectively, all the analysis we did throughout the span of this course

has been great practice.

The content of the course was straightforward and very clearly instructed by you

Professor Feldman. I am glad to have had the opportunity to take and complete this course. I

hope to work with you again in the future.

Sincerely,

Esteban Madrigal
 Work Cited

Mike Bunn “How to Read Like a Writer”