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Dear Past Self,

I just want to say that I'm proud of how far you've progressed over the years. I remember you in high school, dreading to start writing any paper because you knew your writing was no good. Your standardized English scores were consistently low, but you had potential. But then, you started to care about the way your writing was, and you began to put more thought into it. You cared about not only what you expressed on paper, but also how it was expressed. You tried at spoken word and discovered that you weren't terrible at it. Then you tried at short stories and began to improve. 

This picture is going to make a lot more sense to you as you progress through this class. No more of that start-the-paper-the-night-before-and-not-revise-it habit. You will learn the value of revising your work, and that you will always have more room for improvement. I even shared my microtheme with the entire class to get feedback on my work, which is something that I know you probably wouldn't even think about attempting. I learned to comprehensively summarize my thoughts and to filter out my bias from my writing. Also, you'll learn how to evaluate the work of your peers more effectively. Although the microtheme was a relatively short assignment, I ended up having the most amount of drafts for it because my thoughts had to be precise. After all those drafts, you'll be able to be confident in your work and love having written them.

Throughout the class, you will also be assigned many assignments with elements of summary, such as the documentary project and the rhetorical analysis project. Completing the documentary will help you better understand how to strictly summarize and not analyze a passage rhetorically. Also, the rhetorical analysis project will give you insight into how to recognize appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos, and whether or not those appeals were effective. Furthermore, it will well equip you with the ability to make use of those appeals in your own rhetoric. 

However, my personal favorite project was the exploratory essay because of the freedom that accompanied it and the cumulation of skills required to write it. It was an excellent way to gauge the retention of the various rules we learned throughout the semester. You will learn how to properly format quotes, works cited, in-text citations, and titles in MLA format. Additionally, you will be able to follow your thought process of research with added narrative in between. Although it was a relatively long paper, it did not require many drafts, as I was familiar with the mistakes I made in previous assignments and corrected them as I wrote.

Overall, this class will assist you in moving out of your comfort zone, and improve the overall quality of your writing. The number of drafts you'll be writing and the amount of peer-review that you'll be conducting will help to iron out your writing even further. So don't be anxious. Just make an honest effort to learn and you will notice a beautiful transformation.

Yours truly,

Obaid Razi