Reflection of Letter to Family

    I generally enjoyed writing a letter to my family because it was so different from the other genres that we've been writing in class. It let me actually ask myself how I was doing allowed me to reach a different audience than any time previously in this class. It shows how through academic writing it can make you also a more intellectual person and expands our minds. Through writing and researching, reading and attempting to emulate other academic writers, it enables the academic writer within each of us. We are able to become them and encapsulate the same process and methods that they use to write. This alone helps us get an understanding of how to be good writers, and eventually good communicators. After all, good communication is the one thing that others see and perceive of you that allows them to determine how smart a person is. This letter was a great experience to show my family how in only a couple of months how much smarter I have become just from the amount of reading and writing I have done thus far. I will only get smarter in my endeavors and hopefully I was able to show how my expectations were not met yet I am still having the time of my life here and also that school is only going to get better. Being on my own is something that allows me to really see who I am as a person and also to learn new things every day. I really like my experience so far and through writing like this letter, my college experience will only get better.

The Manifesto of the College Student

With high amounts of debt to make up and still deciding on what we want to do for the rest of our lives, it is hard to decide whether we would rather pick a boring office job that will pay off our debt or a job that we actually enjoy yet we will probably be paying off our debt into our thirties. The daily struggle of getting no sleep, putting on weight, joining clubs and still trying to keep our GPA's up is something that we will never have to deal with again once we get out of these four years. Especially freshman year, it is hard finding friends and getting people to like you. Many people become depressed which makes it even harder to do well in school.

In order to do well in college we must:
Study, Study, Study: With the constant deadlines that approach must faster than anticipated, and all of the tests and assignments that have to be completed, time spent studying is never wasted time.
Join Clubs: In order to stay happy, make friends, and add something onto our resume, clubs always keep us busy and allow us to have some fun with something we generally enjoy doing, around people who do the same.
Get to the Gym: Working out not only facilitates a healthy lifestyle, but also releases endorphins in your brain to make you feel better and happier. It also can let us make friends if we play basketball or we can even find someone to workout with.
Get a Workstudy: Finding a job on campus might be hard and sometimes annoying, however it can really help you manage your time and will help you pay off those terrible loans.
Practice Interviews: Interviewing is the one technique that you will need to utilize the rest of your life. The more practice the better because once mastered, it can allow for jobs to start flowing in after your four years of college.
Do Internships: Getting your name out there and showing how hard of a worker you are within any industry can only help you. It even allows you to add another thing onto your resume. The more experience the better and will allow not only the company you interned for to take interest into you, but many others as well.

As long as you work hard while doing all of these things, the four years spent in college will be amazing. Full of friends, work, connections, and fitness, it might be stressful but it will definitely be worth it in the long run.

250- Word Response to A Stranger in Strange Lands

            McCarthy sees how students have to produce different kinds of work, and writing for different teachers. She notices how a student must adjust the way they talk to different teachers depending on their style of teaching and what they are looking for in your work. It talks about how writing processes in classrooms are all different and in every different class, students are presented with new speech situations. Therefore, it analyzes how students figure out what is required for each class and how they go about producing work for each class. To see, a researcher followed a college student named Dave around to a class in every semester of his freshman and sophomore years.
             I felt I could relate to Dave because I too have to adjust my writing styles for different requirements of different classes. The fact that we are reading this article now is almost startling to me because I noticed myself encountering the exact same thing specifically in my politics class. The first essay in my politics class (as with many classes) was my worst. I did terribly and I thought it was because I had never taken a politics class before and never noticed the requirements of what it meant to write politically before. Therefore I had to be more informed, use different more politically correct language, pun intended, and also just use a different rhetoric than what I was used to in other classed. I adjusted and by the times my second paper came around, did so much better. I was able to change my writing style to fit the needs of the class in order to fulfill its needs. Therefore I understand that like Dave you will eventually get to enjoy writing once you understand what it takes to write for that certain class. You have to be a chameleon and adjust to your surroundings in order to be a successful academic writer.

McCarthy, L. P.. (1987). A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum. Research in the Teaching of English, 21(3), 233–265. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40171114