Ivan Jesus Gonzalez

1013 Norellat Rd.

Henderson, Nv 89011
702-883-7269
February 16, 2015
Cady Olsen
Writing Specialist
Writing Center
1021 Paradise Hills Dr.
Henderson, Nv 89002
Dear, Cady Olsen:
As a Nevada State College student, I am concerned with the simple fact that the rest of the
freshmen, including myself, are not necessarily experienced with this form of writing. First of
all, I would like to thank you for reading my letter on what should be done with student writing.
The form of writing that we are all familiar with due to our English classes is APA formatting.
One of my biggest concerns is that students were not taught how to format in high school. The
main point of my letter to you is to explain the status of student writing, as well as what I have
found during my study after interviewing a professor and studying the writing of my scholarly
classmates. It would be in the schools best interest to teach and implement APA formatting.
For this study, I chose to interview a biology professor who will remain anonymous and who
provided conclusive information that will remain unknown due to privacy issues. I also gathered
multiple papers including my own from classmates that range between among several courses
offered at NSC.
Since enrollingment at NSC, I have written multiple papers and I would consider myself a decent
writer that strongly believes in the content of the paper over the length. After taking a look at
them I can identify a few errors that are common. I mentioned earlier that formatting was one of
the main problems in student writing. When it comes to learning something, repetition is key and
the same goes for writing. A few of the classes that I took last semester were Anthropology 216
and Sociology 101, and I noticed that the papers that I wrote failed to have one thing in common
and that was APA. The essays for sociology had more of a MLA style of formatting, with the
basic header and footer at the top of the page. While mMy papers for Anthropology had little to
no formatting with a simple title and name. The main point is that for most of these classes, a
proper format like APA was not assigned and students work was based solely on content. If I had
no prior experience with APA formatting, essentially this would not be a problem for those
classes but other classes like English do require you to have some knowledge.
The thing that intrigues me is that we enter college with only a sense of header and footer style
of format but nowhere near APA style, and the same applies to the rest of my classmates whose
papers I studied. Although formatting is not the only thing that concerns me, grammar and
spelling is huge when it comes down to basic writing. Of course if my papers were notn't edited,

then who knows how many spelling errors or grammatical errors would slip by. I know that
many people who aspire to succeed in writing would certainly take advantage of the tutoring
opportunities, so I would recommend that you teach APA to students as well as implementing it
in their papers.
As for my classmates, I realized that they too were having the same issue throughout their papers
but in different classes than the ones I was taking. The main detail was that a majority of these
papers lacked constant formatting and it varied by course. So what I found was that either these
professors were notn't implementing APA or handing out a correct template for their class. Most
of the papers were plain MLA formatting and also did notn't have a proper format. When looking
at the spelling and grammar, there were fewlittle to no mistakes, so it appears that most freshman
writers have that down. However,but there are others who lack it. Most of these papers lacked
proper sources as well, and this is such a big deal because the way your sources are cited can
determine whether your paper is seen as plagiarism or not. These students should be taught to
implement APA in their papers because then they will be able to cite correctly in one single
format and not just using their citation machines.
While interviewing the professor from the biology department, I found most of the information
very fascinating. One would believe that there would be no need for proper formatting like APA
in a biology class, but this is false. This professor, in fact, does implement APA formatting for
the rare occasions that essays are required. Although tThere was some insight brought to mind
when discussing this topic, and there is more to it than just formatting. One of the questions that
was asked during the interview was How important are conventions, grammar, spelling, and
capitalization in your student writing? The professor responded by saying that these are very
important, and just like formatting, it is notn't stressed enough, and I completely agree.
One would think that a college student would know when to capitalize the letter i and this
brings me to a realization that it is not that the student is notn't familiar with capitalization but
that laziness catches up with one to many students. The professorShe then stated Uh I dont
think its that they dont know, I think its from being careless or they dont want to work a little
bit harder but its very important because that is the right structure of writing anything, biology,
and English.. I could not believe it but the participant of the interview claims that it is very
important given that it is the correct structure of writing in general. I then continued to ask more
questions regarding the style of writing required for the course like what resources are required
for writing in the class, the straightforward answer was pretty much a basic knowledge of
writing. This professor gives the students an APA format for references and template and assigns
them to write their essay in an introduction, body, conclusion style of formatting.
I am aware of the fact that students who plan to stay at this college must take CEP 123 as
a prerequisite for graduating in the future. I took this class last semester and we were taught
many things, but surprisingly APA formatting was not one of them. The essays that were given to
us had a template, but this template was nowhere near APA. Well sSince most students are
required to take this class, then it would be great to persuade the professors of CEP to move this
into their lessons plans. An alternative to this idea would be to start a writing workshop for those
who are willing to take their writing to the next level and have hopes of succeeding in their

classes when a prompt is placed in front of them. Again thank you for taking the time to read this
letter.
Sincerely,
Ivan Jesus Gonzalez

Reflection
When writing this letter I was very stuck on how to go about writing it at first but then I
took a look at a few other letters in general and decided to go off of that. I then tried to
incorporate all of the questions into my paper by making them three separate parts. Even though
the letter doesntt feel complete I wanted to make sure and get as much as I could in there so it
would be enough to be considered a rough draft that way I can go off of the newer ideas that
come to mind later. I first began by talking about my challenges as a writer and my formatting
throughout multiple papers. I then talked about my classmates papers and what I studied on their
papers. Following these topics I explained the interview that I had with the biology professor and
the things they said about formatting and grammar and spelling. As soon as the feedback was
provided I was able to go off of each question and improve the content in each paragraph. More
ideas came to mind as well when writing this because I then figured out an alternative when
having to teach APA that instead of each professor having to go out of their way to teach their
students. The required class to graduate here at this school should offer this into the lesson plan. I
believe that my formatting for this letter well was put as well as the content put into this letter.