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Dear Mrs Feldman,

This class has really pushed my limits of how much writing I can really do. Added on

with two other writing requirement classes, I can say that I am slightly sick of writing this

quarter. However, writing is a subject that I have struggled with since I was in elementary

school, so to be able to take a quarter of strictly writing classes is really good for me and my

development into becoming a better writer. Having my history of not receiving the best marks on

my essays and my overall anxious personality has given me a lot of stress while writing essays.

The extreme amount of writing assignments I have had this quarter, especially from this class,

has vastly decreased my stress and issues with starting and finishing an essay. In highschool,

essays were periodical and did not happen with much frequency, so when the time came to write,

I would always try to put it off as I wanted to avoid failure. However, this quarter I am writing

what seems like an essay a week, so writing time just felt like any other day. My anxiety is still

there when it comes to writing, but this over stimulation of writing assignments has improved

this issue greatly.

In my highschool, me and other students were given strict guidelines on how to structure

essays and, specifically, body paragraphs. It was set in stone that each body paragraph needed a

topic sentence, two quotes of evidence, and two to three sentences of analysis per quotation. As

you have read my essays throughout the quarter, you can see that I still stick to these guidelines

as all my body paragraphs have topic sentences that follow the same structure as giving the main

idea of the body paragraph as a segment of the thesis. However, your prompts are very general

with structure as they just state how many quotes or paraphrases are required for the whole essay

instead of each body paragraph. This structural freedom has also led to my deceased writer's

anxiety that I discussed earlier. When it was time to write my rough drafts for this class, I wrote
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as much analysis as I needed to prove the point of each piece of evidence. For me, this could

range from two to six sentences. I was able just to write what came to mind, which, in my

opinion, made me produce more quality essays as I was not placed with a high amount of

restrictions. In the Writing Project Three reflection, the restrictions were even less strict which

actually posed a slight challenge towards my way. While answering the prompt, I felt myself just

writing without true direction as I didn’t know what my thesis was and what I was analyzing.

However, during my at home revision, I took a look through the student examples in the Starting

Lines book and found out that I was on the right tract and this was just a less formal reflective

analysis that went after the original translation.

Writing Two is my introduction to genre analysis. In highschool, we would always

analyze content that happened in novels, films, articles, and many other genres of media and

literature. However, we would study underlying messages or lessons of the books we read and

really rely on close reading and annotations. The genre based focus of this class is basically the

complete opposite. We don’t need to really know what is written in the piece we are analyzing,

but we need to know how the piece is written in the form of language style, media, and many

other genre conventions. At first, I had a little trouble with this as my workshop draft for Writing

Project One had to be re-written as it compared the differences between genres instead of going

into an extreme genre analysis of a single genre. I know I read the prompt, but thinking about

writing so much on one single genre of text and focusing on the specific conventions just seemed

so foreign to me. However, once I got back to my dorm and spent the whole weekend doing the

assignment correctly, I found out how deeply you can go into genres. There was this technique

that I formed to really look at each part of the text to really determine what was common with

that genre and what made each text of that genre specific. After that essay was completed, I came
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to the consensus that I enjoy genre analysis much more than content analysis. Close reading is

not a great skill of mine, and I feel like there was this definitive answer that came with content

analysis that I was always slightly off on which showed in my writing grades. I never got “C’s”

on writing assignments, but my lack of “A’s” came from my disconnect of the true ideas that the

author was trying to portray. I would never choose the strongest quotes and would always get

docked points because of that. However, with genre analysis, basically every quote and

description in the piece of literature portrays genre conventions. This gave me the confidence to

know that the points of analysis I was making with each example of evidence needed to be there

in order to get a better picture of how this genre is constructed. This confidence lowered my

writer's anxiety, allowed my words to be expressed more freely on the computer screen, and

improved the overall quality of my writing.

I have talked alot about how the Writing Project prompts gave me a lot of structural

freedom, but there was also freedom in choosing a topic for each assignment which continued

with my lack of anxiety and increased enjoyment of writing. In highschool, the topic of each

essay was extremely specific as they consisted of a certain question that is supposed to be

answered by evidence from a piece of literature. I feel like this with the combination of the strict

structural guidelines gives the impression that high school teachers feel like students are not

quite ready to make their own decisions in what they write. Also, California public schools have

strict guidelines on what books are read in each grade and how each essay is prompted. Writing

about something that was not interesting to me made essays an extreme chore and hassle.

However, in this class I was able to research evidence based on musical studies, guitars,

philosophy, and economics. All these topics range from my major in college to my greatest

hobby. The point is that I was able to write about subjects that interest me. The fact that I already
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have a fairly vast amount of prior knowledge on each of these topics made the whole writing

process even easier. While genre analysis and translation, the main focuses of this class, are not

really based on small details of the particular piece of literature, I was still able to receive more

information and knowledge on the topics I am passionate about.

While this class has been quite enjoyable for me, there have been some unavoidable

challenges I have faced along the way. First and foremost, this class is set up in a way where

there just is not enough class time for me to know exactly what I need to do when writing a

Project Builder or Writing Project. I have seen this practically at every single class I have taken

at UCSB and it seems to be a reality in which I have to get used to. Before each assignment

submission, I would always second guess myself and feel that I might have done the whole thing

wrong. I did not know if I contained enough genre analysis in Writing Project One, I thought I

had too much content analysis in Writing Project Two, and in Writing Project Three, I just felt

that my translation was just lacking in content that shows the message stated in the original

article. However, with all the lingering thoughts, I just pressed submit and hoped for the best.

I just want to thank you again for a great quarter. With the COLA protest and the recent

pandemic, you have always showed up to class each day fully prepared and ready to teach. I

wish safety on you and all your loved ones through this tough time we all are facing.

Thank you again,

Max Estes