Reflective Letter Draft 2

-----Writing 101 was a great experience for me this quarter. When I was in high school, I was a pretty good writer and generally did well in my English classes, so when I came into this class, I thought it would be easy. I learned more about writing in this class then all my high school English classes combined. Despite how much I have learned this quarter; there is still room for improvement in my writing. I believe that writing every day helped me develop skills to write my loyalists’ essay and my Bacon’s Rebellion essay.

-----This quarter we wrote an essay where we had states selected for us and a side, either loyalist or patriot also picked for us. Despite the fact that many people thought essay 2 was easier, I thought it was a bit more difficult, just because of the fact that most of our research work was given to us in documents and other sources for essay 1. I believe I had an excellent starting point for the essay, but I needed to work on reading over my essay and making sure it makes sense in the order that I put it in. After I got my essay back I read over it and realized that I didn’t make clarifying points in my paper to refer back to my thesis. For an example, my thesis was In South Carolina, socialism and economy were the two factors that would cause backcountry farmers like myself to side with Britain and become loyalists.” In my paper I didn’t one paragraph that was describing just economy and just social views. If was very unorganized and I saw how it could be confusing to my teachers. As a result, I changed my thesis around to, “In South Carolina, economy, political and social views of the people are the three factors that cause backcountry farmers like myself to side with Britain and become loyalists.” I then revised my paper and made sure that every paragraph was clear to each of my points in my thesis.This is one thing that Craig really stressed and I learned a lot from this essay and I will change this in the future.

-----One essay that I wrote that I felt I did a pretty good job on was my Bacon’s Rebellion essay When the assignment was first given to us, it was a little overwhelming because I knew we were writing on the event, but I thought it was more retelling the story type thing where we were supposed to be detailed dates and a deep discussion on the story. This way everyone's essay would be very similar. When Craig presented how the thesis would be set up, I began to understand more of how we were picking an aspect of the Rebellion and making up our own thesis that we would answer in our essay. I liked this essay because of all the resources we had prior to writing the essay. I would definitely say that one of my strengths is being able to analyze quotes, and the sources that we had for this essay were a great contribution. For an example, I used a packet of primary sources from Bacon’s Rebellion and I was able to use a source from the governor Berkeley at the time that said, “[T]hen in the consideration of service I had done the country, in defending them from, and destroying great numbers of Indians, with out the loss of three men in all the time that war lasted, and in [consideration] of the equal and uncorrupt Justice I had distributed to all men”. I was able to use this quote in a sufficient way because it was primary source from Governor Berkeley that helped me get a better understanding of what he thought was good for the people he governed over. I really liked the templates from the They Say, I Say book. The templates really helped me to develop my paper, and keep it organized. An example of a template in my essay from the book was when I wrote, “Although I agree that trading with Indians in some cases has proven fatal, but I cannot accept his overall conclusion that all Indians are bad”. I used this template from chapter four of the They Say, I Say book. This template shows how to agree with an argument and then at the same time disagree with a different aspect of the argument. This helps add complexity to an argument instead of just simply agreeing or disagreeing. This template helped me analyze my quote in a deeper because I was explaining both parts of my subject.

-----When the quarter we did a lot of writing. At first the writing was not necessarily supposed to be structured. We did a lot of free writing in the beginning just to get in the habit of it everyday. This really helped because I didn’t feel any pressure at first to right a certain way, because everyone has there own style of writing. After we got used to writing everyday, we put structure on our writing by looking at worksheets how to put together a paragraph and we read templates from our They Say, I Say book which I was surprised how much it benefited and helped develop my writing. The templates were there to help build up my writing and get it out of the same old style of having the same word phrases or same transition words. It helped my writing in the way so my reader wouldn’t become easily bored. Writing 101 benefited me greatly during this quarter and I would definitely recommend this class to anyone as an excellent source in improving writing skills.