I am choosing to write this letter to the class. This class was honestly one of my favorite classes this semester and Professor Olivia was my favorite professor. This class was a great way to meet friends and start my week on Monday mornings. Professor Olivia was also a very understanding professor and she always tried to help us get the best grade we can no matter the circumstance. This class was a very unique and fun class, all my classmates were cool in their own way and I loved that everyone had a different story and background to them.

  I learned a lot from English 101 that will help me in the future throughout college. One thing I learned the most was APA citations. Professor Olivia knows I started off terrible while doing them and to be quite honest I probably still am really terrible at doing APA citation. The difference is that now I know how to do and I can only get better from here on forward. APA citations were something that I would just do by finding a website that would generate the citation and put it into APA citation for me. Now I know thanks to Professor Olivia that the sites don’t always cite the citation correctly. 

I also learned a lot more about rhetorical devices and how to use them as my own in sentences. I learned the true meaning of ethos, pathos, and logos. I also learned how to create a website and a portfolio. The portfolio part I am still in the process as you can tell by the site but it is definitely a work in progress.

  There are still a lot of things I want to learn about in English. I still want to learn how to do APA citations faster and quicker. I also want to broaden my vocabulary and learn new words so when I talk to people it’s not as boring. Also because in the future during interviews, intelligence is key so showing that you can speak well and you are very knowledgeable can help you get that job. 

I want to further develop my writing skills. By writing skills, I mean the way I write and organize my thoughts. I feel like sometimes my essays and papers are all over the place and are not really in place. I feel like if I can find ways to organize my thoughts and have a more precise image of how I want to write my essays then I could become a great writer. I feel as if this class humbled me because I was always in AP English and I got a 97 on my ELA regents so I thought I knew everything there was to English until this course. This course helped me realize that there is still a lot left to learn and I am just beginning my journey to learning more and more about English. 

  Some of my achievements this year were my grades. Although my grade right now is 89 and I am not too happy with that, it does reflect my work. I didn’t put my best effort into all of my work and on numerous occasions, I forgot to proof-read my work which led to silly mistakes which ultimately led to a lower grade. I have not necessarily achieved all my writing objects but I do think that throughout my 4 years in John Jay if my teachers are as great as Professor Olivia then I will learn a lot and be able to achieve my goals as far as writing. 

  I feel like I have grown greatly in the way I write since I began the course. I not only became aware of the type of writer I want to be but I became aware of how I can fix my flaws. I learned that procrastination only made me rush and it made my paper include a lot of errors. For the first half of the class I would procrastinate everything, then the other half I decided to try a different approach.

  My new approach consisted of me doing trying to do whatever assignment I was assigned the day of and if I was too busy at least read the requirements for the assignment. This helped me tremendously because I was able to organize my thoughts more and know what was needed for the assignment ahead of time. These new methods also allowed me to proofread my essays for a short amount of time before the deadline for the assignment was due. What also helped me a lot was reading the syllabus ahead of time. 

  Reading the syllabus ahead of time prepared me for classes and it helped me get an idea of what was going to be happening as soon as I walked into the classroom. The syllabus also helped me organize what assignment due what day and what needed to be done as soon as possible. The syllabus is something that I was unfamiliar with when I first entered college and with the semester coming to an end, I am starting to realize that this is my best friend. The syllabus is a very resourceful tool that teachers give you at the beginning of the semester and it basically tells you to have everything that will be happening throughout the semester in the course. The syllabus can help you become organized and prepared for future assignments, tests, homework, and etc.   This course has helped me notice my flaws, the things I’ve improved on, the things I must work on and grow on, and it has helped me set up goals for myself. It helped me notice flaws of procrastination, not no so much knowledge of APA citation, how to use ethos, pathos, and logos to grasp the attention of my readers, how to use the rhetorical device in my essay, and etc. Based on my grades throughout the course I knew I grew by learning how to organize and prepare for things that are gonna happen in class ahead of time, I learned how to do APA citations better, I also learned how to incorporate my ideas into an essay while still keeping it organized and maintaining a steady idea. In the future I have hopes of becoming better at organizing my thoughts and implementing them into an essay and I hope very big dreams of getting really familiar with APA citations and doing it without a problem quickly. I am very grateful for everything I have learned within the classroom of English 101 and I thank Professor Olivia for all the help and wonderful advice she has given me these past few months. I hope throughout college to fulfill my goals in English, to learn more than I ever suspected, and to face every obstacle that comes in my way.