Awkward Letter to Self

March 26, 2013

Dearest Jennifer,

This was the most hectic quarter I’ve had since coming back to school. English class proved to be no easy task, and I let my gigantic ego get the best of me earlier in the year. I came into this course expecting that it would all be review from what I learned years ago in high school. However, I quickly realized that I needed a bit of work when it comes to formatting an essay. My previous classes gave me a false sense of my writing ability because I received an A on every written assignment. Here, I received my first B, and the ensuing disappointment snapped me back into reality.

Reading was the easy part. The trouble came when it was time to apply the newly acquired knowledge and put it into a specifically formatted essay. Even when I attempted to use an outline, I’d completely change the direction of my essay. The unfortunate result of this on multiple occasions was a written assignment that wasn’t quite up to par in regards to what the professor wanted. I found that I was not adding enough explanations to my paragraphs. In my head, I saw things as self-explanatory. In writing for an audience I can’t make the assumption that others will understand where my train of thought is heading. Perhaps this is why professors never gave me any issues with my Psychology or Sociology papers—they were already familiar with the material so it was easy to know what the point of my paper was going to be. Maybe that’s yet another bold assumption, and I’m merely trying to cope with my cognitive dissonance by applying an external attribution to my less-than-satisfactory grades.

College life at 29

The most significant discourse occurred with topics I was not fully prepared to write about. On our first assignment, writing about an American artifact, I honestly just punched a bunch of words into Microsoft Word, and the end result was not exactly a college-level essay. It was painfully obvious that I did not pay attention to sentence order or content. With the technology and culture assignment, I again made the same old mistakes. I didn’t provide adequate explanations, and the final product kind of gave the impression that I wasn’t trying hard enough. I worked to improve upon this in the following essays. My ad analysis showed that I finally started paying attention to format and explanations, and I believe it to be the best essay I wrote for this class.

My last quarter at Foothill College is on the horizon, and I have to complete yet another English class before my transfer to Palo Alto University. I hope that I will be able to avoid anxiety-inducing results on my subsequent essays. I also have an extremely important scholarship essay due soon. After realizing my weak points, I should be able to effectively review what I wrote months ago and edit it in an adequate manner. Once I’ve transferred, I hope that my Psych professors at PAU will find my work to be at a professional level. In any case, I’ve got at least seven more years of school left, so there will be plenty of time for me to improve my writing process and apply what I've learned this quarter.

Godspeed,
Jennifer