The Value of the Introductory Letter
I’ve said this before in a discussion board post, but I’ve always enjoyed introductory letters as a first assignment. They’re chances for students to creatively express (or at least attempt to) who they are and what makes them tick. It adds color to students who are, for the most part, just names on a list at that point in the semester. For professors, it gives them a chance to get insight into who their students are, what they’re looking for in this class, and a gauge of their immediate writing capabilities. There was no draft for this paper and that was a good thing. When I wrote my introductory letter, I did minimal editing and just wrote my unfiltered feelings.
Where I Went Wrong and What I Learned About Myself as a Writer and as a Person.
I’m very proud of my failures. It is one thing to handle extraordinary hardship in life and come out of it stronger. That’s something I have ample experience with. I’ve been homeless before, lived in basements, broken bread with the local spider population, traveled for hours to get to school my entire life, and felt that challenges only made me stronger. A trial by fire was an opportunity for growth.
After finally burning out after not having taken a break in years, I ended up dropping out of school. The days blurred together, and eventually living a life at home grew too boring and I went back to school. I didn’t realize how difficult it was to put the pieces of my life back together, and how there were so many obstacles in my way. Understandably my writing skills had deteriorated over a period of a couple years of not applying them. When I was asked to write an essay for the first time, I figured the easiest way to talk about my life and what I was looking for from this class was by just throwing my thoughts out there.
A decent chunk of ideas managed to get across. My rhetorical goal was to provide a glimpse into the different things that make me, and let those things paint a better picture of me. Ideas and stories that bleed into the paper let you tell a story of 1000 words in 500. However, my rationale for why I’m pursuing science isn’t particularly well described in my introductory essay. For a class that is predicated on writing for the sciences, I was incapable of writing about science. I’ve thought long and hard about why I find science more fascinating than any other subject, and where I want that passion to take me. This was a criticism that was addressed in the feedback I received from my professor, and I took that criticism and tried to answer it in my scientist profile draft. Instead of it being a separate paper, it felt more like a continuation of my introductory letter. For that reason alone, seeing the pieces of a portfolio rather than isolated works can show that I really did try to improve my writing.
