Dear prospective English 110 Student,

I hope you are prepared for this journey of endless explorations because English110 will change your life as a writer.
As a student who comes from Poland, in the very beginning I found this class a little bit challenging. It can be intimidating for a foreign student to write papers that are not in your first language. Sometimes the real emotions and stance can be misunderstood because of a language barrier. I was afraid that I will receive low grades and won’t be able to express my thoughts correctly. I couldn’t be more wrong. This class not only helped me overcome that fear but also made me realize that I love writing in English even more than I do in Polish. With a constant support from my teacher, Professor Danielle Carr, I started to grow and I keep becoming a better writer every day.

My writing process has changed drastically. The first letter I wrote was 2 pages long and it took me a few days to get it done. Our last paper was 8 pages and I was capable of finishing the first draft within one day. This is what I call a huge progress! Not only I became more natural with my writing style, but thoughts and phrases kept flowing. What’s even more important, I began to notice mistakes my Professor pointed out in the beginning and at the end of the course I noticed 80% improvement.
Even back in Poland I loved writing, but I never knew about rhetorical elements which should be considered by every writer. I wrote papers with one goal in my mind. Now one of the first things I think of are genre, audience, stance, exigence, purpose and media. Knowing who will be reading my paper helps me choose style I want to write it in. Choice of genre makes my paper deliver different message to the audience. I also understand that my emotions and opinion can be interpreted by the reader so I try to choose my stance and make it easy to recognize by the reader. I also learned that the stance could change throughout the paper, and it is a writer’s choice. Before this semester started I didn’t realize that there’s always something that makes you write, prompt you to expressing your thoughts or opinion. Now, I always consider exigence as well as purpose, which is what I want to achieve by writing my paper.

This project’s main goal is to show you how much my writing process changed and how important is ENGL 110 in your academic life. As you will see while scrolling through all the pages, writing process starts from considering all 6 rhetorical elements, then is followed by many drafts after which we finally create our paper perfect. It’s a beautiful process of exploration and a journey on which every writer goes each time. I couldn’t be more grateful for being able to participate in this course. I am also very jealous of you, having your journey just started.

Enjoy every second of it, as you are becoming the better version of yourself.

Ewelina Randall