Merritt 1

Isaac Merritt
Professor Jizi
UWRT 1103
15 December 2015
Reflection letter
Dear Reader,
This may come as a shock but I was once a very bad writer. I had the talent and the
ability, but not the means of transformation to take my skills, as poorly showcased in the selfauthorship essay, to the point where they are in my research paper. Through free writing every
day to sharpen my skills through practice, to writing various pieces such as my self-authorship
essay and my journals, I sharpened from a scatter brained, ranting, senior in high school that can
be seen in my early work, to the focused objective individual I am today: evident in some
revisions. My important work in this class by far is my research paper. I spent days on it and it
summarizes weeks of research. Additionally this paper is on a subject I care about which has lots
of misinformation from unreliable sources. In other words, I am one of the few that has the
information my audience is looking for. One of my biggest strengths is analogies and
comparisons. I can break things down easily like I did in my research paper. My ongoing
challenge is organization. My papers go off track sometimes and I need to keep them on track at
all times. This phenomenon can be seen at certain points in my self-authorship essay.
Because of the research-paper-related assignments in this class, I have become much more
skeptical of the internet. The other day, a friend of mine was having an argument with a second

Merritt 2

friend about using forums as a way to find 100% correct knowledge. After reading books on the
subject, his words have new truth and meaning. People with actual knowledge and experience
dont post on the internet, they write books. When looking for car related sources, the best place
to find accurate sources on scientific topics is a book. I used a few of them in writing my paper.
All in all, I enjoyed most of the assignments for this class, I found the literacy narrative
interesting and considered it hard because it was early on in the course. The first self-authorship
essay, for me was hard to write, as made evident by my error in format. I thought it asked
questions that were difficult to answer for me. The second self-authorship essay was surprisingly
easy by comparison but it felt a tad redundant in material, being the subjects were very similar. I
actually liked doing the essay portion of the EIP research essay but finding sources was a
nightmare for my topic and drove me to the brink. The genre project was so natural to me
whereas nothing else was, I no longer felt like I was being beaten into a cookie-cutter project
during that. Lastly my e-portfolio was unexpectedly difficult. I overwrote some of my drafts for
papers. Additionally, some of my submitted drafts were incomplete which made doing this
project even harder. Overall though, Id say I overcame these challenges.