Dear Future me,

11th grade, the year of stress and improvement. It was a huge year. Looking back you probably feel it was worth it, it was a gross realization of life in college, and adult life in general, but one of your biggest achievements this year, was the evolution of your writing ability and your perception of writing.

I want you to remember your junior year of high school. Do you remember Writing for the Humanities? Recall your thoughts of writing at the beginning of the year. You thought the ability to write was something only a select bunch of people could do well, to sum it up you thought that writing was a complete waste of one’s time, a free F in your grade book paired with a side of no sleep.

At the beginning of the year, you thought writing was a barbed wall you must cross by necessity to get through life. As a future engineer you were lacking in most forms of writing but research papers, which is just stating and explaining the evidence. You were too focused on math, computer science, and other material pertaining exclusively to engineering. But in the end, your writing evolved.

In that humanities class, you learned to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. Through the course of the semester, you became a more effective reader, grasping the main ideas and points of an article in a way you couldn’t before. A better drafter with the help of your professor Shamecca, and your peers, and a better revisor and editor as the expectations of your writing became clearer.

Accompanied by the enhanced strategies you also learned how to express your own writing goals and audience expectations based on genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. In your very first essay assignment, this skill wasn’t clearly defined until later drafts. Instead of guiding your readers to change you would just oversaturate your work with evidence, which left the reader to interpret it themselves as there was no clear end goal. This brings you back your Op-Ed topic reflection which a good start.

You did an outstanding job since the topic was relevant and your exigence was strong, but you failed to consider your audience, message, and you failed to consider the limitations of your audience, which was defined by your final draft.

This course also taught you to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes by way of peer review. At first, you thought peer review was a waste of printing paper, time, and a good way for your peers to see how bad of a writer you are. After the first peer review, you saw its importance, as the advice was helpful and you got a better understanding of what to fix  

Peer review was a key component to make your writing overall better, not only did you learn how to judge papers yourself, you had a clearer understanding of what your writing was supposed to sound like based on reading/listening to the writings of your peers.

In this course, while you practice new strategies you also polished old ones like how to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. In your critical analysis essay, you chose to analyze two simple political cartoons which in itself was a major improvement from before. Through examples, you learned how to analyze each section of a text or image and determine its significance.

And from this analysis, you also effectively formulated and articulated a stance through and in your writing based on the points retrieved from the analysis, which was also, evidently weak from your first draft, along with being able to analyze the points of an article deeper you were better able to develop your stance on those points.

Lastly, you learned to cite PROPERLY which was not your biggest strong suit, and you always got told by your teachers that your credibility and overall evidence you put in some essays was lacking, and learned how to use CCNY’s database to get evidence. You learned simple but important things, like in-text citations, works cited page and in formats and methods on how to determine if a source is credible like checking the about us page of a cite, which without a doubt will prove to be very useful by the time you read this.

However, one key point you didn’t quite grasp in the course was acknowledging linguistic differences as resources, and drawing on those resources to develop a rhetorical sensibility. While learning this concept at the beginning of the semester you were overwhelmed by the use of new vocab words to didn’t quite grasp, as a result, you didn’t really understand the concept and avoided it in your writing.

Entering the class you imagined a stereotypic writing class, a class with boring essays and even more boring lectures, but as the semester slowly progressed this image changed, this was not your typical writing class. You were allowed to write about a topic that you were interested in making writing a bit more enjoyable, like the SAT and ever-increasing gang violence in New York. You were given the strategies to write, and with it, you developed your own process of writing setting the foundation of future writing assignments. You were able to make your essays flow, you learned how to transition smoother, and your writing didn’t seem as choppy. All of this is thanks to professor Harris who in your book is to date the best writing teacher you’ve had. As a Computer Science, you will later compare the evolution of ones writing like a code, a code is time-consuming and required trial and error, and like writing, a code is never perfect, there is always room for improvement. You now see writing as a way to evolve your way of expressing ideas to an audience.

Give thanks to professor Harris, her approach to teaching the class allowed you to bring your writing to the next level, and thanks to her your writing will evidently continue to evolve.

Best Regards.

Ruben Genao