To whom it may concern,

My first year in the college writing environment was unlike anything I had been prepared
to do throughout my high school career. Writing had previously been a mindless, oftenpurposeless endeavor that ventured nowhere outside of formulaic familiarity. Needless to say,
college was quite the culture shock. My first year in college English exposed me to the many
real-world applications of writing, and took off the numerous, arbitrary restraints that were
imposed upon me. I was given the opportunity to flex my creative muscles a little, as far as
writing was concerned. Specifically, it was stressed upon that there is no definite way to
approach the literary world that works for everyone. In short, I learned that writing is a process
that one needs to develop for themselves. Writing and reading are not cookie-cutter processes,
and require deep understanding of their ins and outs in order to execute them effectively. My
first year of college English facilitated, for me, just that; through exposure to many different sorts
of writing, and rejection of any one notion as to how they were to be handled (both from reader
and writer perspectives), I began to grasp what was expected of me in the world of college
English.
One of the first assignments I was introduced to was the dialectical journal, or DJ. This
was also my first real experience with the freedom that college writing provides, as compared
with high school. It also provided me with invaluable insight into the different, sometimes
even conflicting views that the authors of the articles had about how writing and reading
should be conducted. I was made, through the DJs, to realize how real-world writing was
viewed and conducted both in the educational setting and outside of it. Though no concrete
conclusions were to be drawn from the readings accompanying the DJs, the mere volume of

different perspectives and pieces of advice was enough to punctuate the point that writers all
have their own special ways of going about their business.
My experience with the DJs enabled me to see documents in a different light than I had
before. Rarely were works ever read on the mere content level. Rather, everything was
analyzed under a literary microscope to find out just what made them tick. This point was
further driven home when we visited the rhetorical analysis. This assignment, at first, felt totally
alien to me. Not only was I analyzing, from an English context, decidedly non-English works,
but I had to read between the lines to show how the writer used strategy, tactics, genre
conventions, and textual conventions to sway the reader in one way or another (never mind the
literal content-level meaning of their work). This allowed me to begin to see the underlying,
metacognitive processes utilized by the writer to affect the audience in a given way, outside
of the immediate content-level meaning of their words.
Of course, none of these lessons would mean anything if I could not apply them to my
own writing. Starting with the starchy, formulaic approach hammered into me during high
school, I started to see the limitations I had been placing on myself. Following the advice of
various articles read during our DJs, as well as from our text, They Say, I Say, I started to
develop and nurture my own writing style. Unfortunately, this involved lots of trial and error,
but I eventually came to find what worked for me. Slowly, but steadily, my own processes of
reading, writing, and research began to surface and become refined. For example, I initially
read documents that I had to later write about in far too quick a manner to effectively analyze
them. After experimenting with different reading methods during the course of my English class,
I began to see the advantages of making thorough annotations, marking important passages, and
summarizing text for later referral. The same can be said of my research and writing processes

as well. When researching, I now make it a point to ensure that all of my information in a given
article is relevant, and has clear purpose in my work, whereas my old style involved finding any
sort of information, and shaping it to fit what I already had to work with. This vastly improved
the quality of my research.
Writing, on the other hand, went through a serious change since high school. Previously,
I had always gone into assignments with no clue what I was going to write about. These blind
drafts results reflected back on the haphazard process used in their creation, even though I
earned high marks for technically following instructions. This approach quickly saw its end in
college, with much more thorough analysis of my work than of mere adherence to guidelines.
One of the biggest concerns/weaknesses I faced, in this respect, was fluidity. The uncertainty
that accompanied my previous writing style kept me from making a smooth, flowing work of
writing that would be appealing to a reader. However, once I changed my style to accommodate
a more definite start and end point (merely filling in the gap between point A and point B), I saw
a more logical flow begin to emerge from my writings. Between any two points in space,
whether they be literal, or metaphorical, there is always a path. The same goes for writing. If
one has in mind where they want to go, and pays due attention to where they currently are, the
process is as simple as figuring out how to get there one step at a time. This logical flow meshes
easily with an audiences line of thinking, as it follows one bit of logical information with
another, and another, until the destination is eventually reached. My fluidity quickly became my
defining characteristic in my college writing, at least in my mind. My style evolved even further
from my aforementioned one to resemble more of an internal dialogue with myself. I pictured
myself talking a piece of writing out in my head, taking on a slightly more conversational tone

than before. This both streamlines my writing, and makes it easier for a reader to follow my
train of thought as my writing continues.
A final facilitating process shown to me during my first year of college, one that I feel has
improved my writing almost as much as my major style changes, is the notion of collaborating to
refine ideas. Often, the self is not the best source for inspiration or ideas on writing. I found
that, at least within groups in our classroom setting, the collective opinions and thoughts of
all affiliated people in a communal writing process helped to form strong, sound, wellrounded ideas that reflected the best input from a variety of people all at once. Each
member, in such a setting, is able to have the best of their ideas incorporated into a final product,
while also having the privilege of the critical eye of one other than themselves to weed out the
weaker parts of their ideas. Combining these properties from multiple people has the effect of
bolstering greatly the final outcome of a communal brainstorming and/or writing process; the
best ideas get better, and the worst are cast aside.
This spirit of collaboration would go hand in hand with our research project a ways down
the road. It was during this time that we really got to experience the concept of a discourse
community firsthand. Save for what I would imagine was a scant few of us, we all had to choose
topic areas that were not of the same discourse community as we were a part of. Technology,
science, politics, and many other areas that fell under our chosen topics all contained
different discourse communities that specialists in said fields were a part of. As such, we all
had to learn to connect the language, at least, between our different communities, and
overcome differences in order to glean good information from their articles. This
broadening of our understanding of the ways that different groups speak, write, and otherwise
communicate did greatly to further our versatility as writers.

This, I feel, was the chief lesson to be learned from my first experience with
college writing. I feel that the most important lesson we learned was to be versatile. Being able
to adapt to ones own weaknesses and strengths permits development of a good, strong,
personalized writing style that maximizes ones efficiency. Being able to adjust understanding to
fit different writing and communication styles of different peoples and groups helps to broaden
the range of information available to a writer. Once a writer learns to adapt, there is hardly a
situation or prompt available that can stump that writer. A new solution will always be in the
process of formation.

Respectfully,

Blake Johnson