Kevin Guaman

Professor Dalton

ENGL 210

December 11, 2021

Dear future ENGL 210 students,

Welcome to your semester at City College of New York. As someone who has gone through the course, I can provide some insight in what you can learn from the experience with Professor Dalton. My goals in the class were to write decent college papers and get an A to move on to the next class. To my surprise, this course wasn’t like any English course I went through before. I was given the chance to experiment with my writing. Through the course, I was able to learn how to make my writing my own writing and how to write an essay properly and better.

I learned to make my writing unique. Before I began the class, I grew up writing like a robot. I would just state the facts and it would feel bland, but it got me the A’s. In this class, I got to learn how to write in a different way. For example, during a free write, I wrote “How will it be different from the books I usually like reading, which is mostly fiction (I doubt it’ll be anything like The Dead by Charles Higson).” The free write was an answer to the question “Do you expect to learn in the book club.” A simple question that I could have answered with a short response. Instead, I added my voice to the response as a comment comparing the books I usually read to Fairest. This allows the audience to get a sense of who I am through my comment about my book preferences. Another example of writing uniquely is when I compare the titles of my blog posts, which are “Stereotypes of Good Looks in Fairest” and “Special=White?”. The blog posts we wrote for our book clubs involved a format where we needed a unique title for each post. My first blog post was simple and straight to the point. While there is nothing wrong with that, it isn’t going to hook a reader into wanting to read it. The second blog post was made as I decided to try out a new way of writing titles. While it does tell you what the blog post will be about, it is different from any other blog post and it is a more interesting title for readers. The course gave me a chance to learn how to make my writing unique.

The course also taught me how to properly write a college paper and how to make it better. This was my first time using the APA format for essays, so it was all new to me. As I wrote more and more essays, I learned more and more how to properly write an APA college paper. I especially needed to learn how to properly make citations for my papers, especially for photos. An example of this form of citation is ““Carulmare. (2008). CARAVAGGIO Sacrifice of Isaac, 1601-02 [Online image]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/8545333@N07/2236990792”. This was a citation for one of the photos I used for a blog post. I never cited photos before so I was hesitant, but learning this skill helps me expand my writing by not limiting what I can use as resources. Another example of improving writing is seen in my freewrite, where I admitted that ““I want to know more ways to hook the audience. I only ever used “throughout history” or something like that.” When I was in high school, I was the one who used “throughout history” in the first sentence of almost every paper. It can be used, but there are better ways to write an introduction. An introduction is meant to hook the audience into wanting to read more, but as soon as anyone sees those words, it weakens it. If I kept using it, I definitely wouldn’t have gotten a good grade. A third example is before this course, I wrote transition sentences at the end of every paragraph. In high school, it was seen as fine and I was taught to do this. However, in college, it only comes off as repetitive and just hurts your writing. I only learned this through my peers and our peer editing sessions, so you’ll never want to miss those! Sometimes your peers’ way of writing can help you improve your writing, too. 

In the end, I appreciate all that I have gained from this course. I have grown as a writer and had fun doing so. If you want to make the most of this class, make sure to work with your peers and the professor. The only real way to grow is to share your writing with others, so participation is key. So I hope you enjoy the class and I hope you have a great semester!

Sincerely,

Kevin Guaman