Owen 1

Dear Future English Teacher,

Even though I have grown as a writer this year from American Literature, I still have
some areas of my writing that can use some help. For example, I can sometimes make many
grammatical and formatting mistakes. One of my most common errors, especially from the first
semester, was floating quotations. In the first draft of my Dark Romanticism Literary Analysis, I
had many quotes that I cited from the literary works that I chose. However, the quotes were
usually just inserted into paragraphs and I did not provide enough context for them. I eventually
learned to correct these floating quotations by acknowledging who wrote or said the quote, and I
connected it to the main idea of its paragraph. Another error that I commonly had in my writing
was the overuse of certain words. For example, I would continue to repeat words in my Midterm
Exam essay. To fix this, I began to run all of my assignments through Grammarly. Grammarly
notifies you if you have a commonly used word. After this, I went to a thesaurus to find more
options and replace the overused word. My final common error was writing awkward sentences.
For example, some of my sentences in my Dark Romanticism Literary Analysis sounded strange
when read out loud. To fix this, I read some of my paper out loud to my peers so that I could
catch the peculiar wording.
Even though I have common errors in my writing, I also have strengths. I like to come
up with creative titles for my papers. For example, my title for the Dark Romanticism Literary
Analysis is Welcome to the Dark Side: A Dark Romanticism Literary Analysis. I am also good
at providing enough examples to defend my thesis statement. In the classroom, I am a good
listener and can give sufficient feedback to my classmates when they need someone to peer edit
their papers. I hope that this letter has been helpful in providing examples of various strengths
and weaknesses in my writing.

Owen 2
Thanks,
Mary Emerson Owen