Dear Jane,

            When I was creating my schedule a couple of months ago, I was unsure about this course, Writing for the Humanities and Arts English. What does it even mean? Does it have to do with history? Does it have to do with actual art? Is it a fancy name for a regular English class? All these questions were running through my head, wondering what was to come in my second semester as a freshman in City College.

            After going through the semester, I would say it is pretty similar to a regular English class. The only difference I noted was that we didn’t spend the entire class reading books to create an essay about. Instead, we wrote about ourselves, were more creative in our assignment and would read articles and poems. Every piece of literature we read had a purpose in our assignment. For instance, in our critical review assignment we read book reviews because we needed to understand how a critic thinks and writes. This assignment was actually my favorite ones out of all.

            While completing the critical review assignment I already knew what a critic was. There are all types of critics such as book critics, movie critics and even movie critics. The actual hard part was deciding what did I want to review and how will I do it. At first, I thought about doing a short story but then I realized a movie would be better because I can analyze it better. The way characters and the overall plot. I looked at many movies I would call classics such as coach carter and freedom writers. Then I remembered one I watched years back in AMC theaters ona school trip, Hidden Figures.

movie was perfect, it is based on a true story and the acting was phenomenal. Some people might say doing a movie is a quick way out, but I disagree. I spent about 8 hours completing the assignment. It took me about three to almost four hours to watch it and take notes one scenes that caught my attention. I then had to quote it and research the accuracy of the movie and the directors’ purpose of creating it. After conducting all my research, I then had to read some reviews in order to know what way I wanted to go about it. Eventually, I actually started writing my review and I truly enjoyed it. I didn’t feel like I was struggling, nor did it feel like an assignment, I actually found it fun.

            No writers first draft is perfect even if you’re a professional. This course wasn’t all about being the perfect writer. I would say it was about how can you use your resources and peers to be the best writer you can be. Every assignment first draft was followed with comments from a peer, Josh and you Jane. 

I can tell you with complete certainty without that help, my final drafts would be just as rough as the first, lol. I feel like the hardest adjustment I’ve had due to the pandemic is the way English classes are. My high school was extremely big on annotations. They would even have us annotate prompts and anything we would read. So now that everything is online, I can’t just analyze an online article the same way I was taught for so long. This was a struggle because sometimes we would have discussions with questions that are answered in an article and I would keep forgetting the answers or the question. After two semesters online, I definitely prefer to write and have paper copies in English classes. Even reading feedback was odd. Instead of seeing exactly what I should change and where, I would receive generalized feedback on what to add and remove. This made the final draft a little harder to edit but on the bright side, I could always reread the feedback and I am learning different ways to fix my work.

Some people don’t enjoy receiving feedback but I do and I make sure to revise my wok. Sometimes its really hard but its for your own good. For my critical review assignment, some of my feedback told me to summarize less yet add more details. This was hard for me because how am I supposed to remove the detail that I felt was important yet im supposed to add details that are specific along with other things. This was a struggle but I definitely made it happen.

Removing information you included in an assignment because you believed it was crucial is very hard. As you can see, I removed a lot of information in the paragraph even though it was very interesting and had it purpose but it improved my final.

Throughout this course I felt support from my peers and you Jane. Everyone was willing to help each other out and you tried to make class as interactive as possible even though some students would struggle to focus or pay attention. I remember when you spoke to me personally about it and it made me want to try harder to focus. This is because I felt like you care about all your students even though you didn’t know what some of us looked like or sounded like. It felt like an actual class just through a laptop. This was definitely one of my top 3 favorite courses as a freshman because of this. It made me realize I can be more creative than I once thought. The given assignments were never about “^{can she analyze this text}“, they were always how can the students show an idea in a creative way. I truly appreciate your effort as a professor and the way you treated all of us. Thank you for a great semester and maybe I might come across you next year with in person learning and say hi!

Sincerely,

Melanie 🙂