You will prepare and submit a term paper on English Exit Letter. Your paper should be a minimum of 500 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on English Exit Letter. Your paper should be a minimum of 500 words in length. I remember predicting this to be somewhat challenging with my not being in an English in about a decade as an excuse. Well, in retrospect, it was. But in a college writing course like this, challenging, I realized, isn’t necessarily synonymous to unwieldy.

I enjoyed myself a lot, in fact. Ten years of literary dormancy and here I am rediscovering the long forgotten joys of writing. After quitting school in (year here), destiny simply did not point me back to the wonderful world of writing until this year.

This is why I’m very grateful to have taken this course. My interest in writing suddenly came back and I realized it isn’t such a laborious task at all. One only has to put his thoughts into words until these words produce sentences and sentences form paragraphs. This I can accomplish quite easily when I’m in the mood. But when I’m not, I could just stare at the emptiness of my computer screen, wishing the hyperactive cursor to do the job for me. Writer’s block, they called it. Every writer, I believe, will have to deal with it time and time again.

Putting thoughts into words is a piece of cake. To keep it structured though is another story – a skill a have yet to master. Happily, this problem seems to persist only in my informal essays. Formal is much more precise, topic clearly defined, making it easier for me to discern which information needs to be included and which one should be eliminated. With informal essays, it’s as if I’m just talking to someone about something so passionately that I tend to ignore unity and coherence within my paragraphs. I was told that, when used properly, this free flowing method in writing could actually become an asset, so it isn’t such a bad thing after all.

I could hardly tell if my old writing process was in fact a process. For all I know, I simply wrote. I was adamant to follow my own style, which I liked to call a process, despite being aware that it’s not always recommended. Though this may not be such a dramatic change, this course taught me the formal discipline in writing which I consider to be a significant improvement. Planning, I learned, is indeed a very crucial stage in writing in order to come up with an effective output. This enabled me to explore other genres such as informative and compare and contrast essays.

Indeed, such a challenging course it was. But I remember too that at the beginning of this course, I simply wanted to become a better writer. I believe I am now.

Happy holidays everyone.