I have attached my old essays with the professor notes on my essays

Write a 3-4 page letter to the instructor, which includes your own analysis of your work in this class.

You may discuss any of the following in this letter:

* Your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and how these may have changed or your awareness of these may have been altered.

* The essay that you are most pleased with

* The essay that you are least pleased with

* The difficulty level of the various essays you completed for this class

* The format of this class

* The quality of lecture notes, instructor feedback on papers, and other materials

* The helpfulness of the textbook

* Your progress from Comp I to Comp II

Though this letter is to be addressed to the instructor, the real point of this paper is for you to reflect on this semester–how the course did (or did not) help you grow as a writer–and prepare yourself for other writing assignments you may have in the future.

Please be sure to review the Submit Your Assignment of Unit #7 section for specific instructions on how you should turn in your work for grading. The Final Letter to the Instructor is due at the end of Unit #7.

For your final paper in this class, you will be writing a 3-4 page letter to the instructor evaluating this course and your progress this semester.  You will want to use examples and explanation to justify your evaluation.

Again, you may discuss any of the following in this letter:

*Your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and how these may have changed or your awareness of these may have been altered.

*The essay that you are most pleased with

*The essay that you are least pleased with

*The difficulty level of the various essays you completed for this class

*The format of this class

*The quality of lecture notes, instructor feedback on papers, and other materials

*The helpfulness of the textbook

* Your progress from Comp I to Comp II

Please be sure to justify your evaluations of your own work and the course using specific examples whenever possible.

Here are some questions to keep in mind as you are revising your Final Letter to the Instructor:

* Is the overall focus of the letter clear in the first paragraph?  In other words, does the first paragraph make it clear what you’ll be discussing specifically?

* Are examples from your own essays (or the course materials) used to support your claims?

* Is the letter generally well-organized, and does it use transitions effectively?

* Is there a sense of closure (or completion) in the conclusion?

As with all of your other papers, please keep in mind that I’ll still be considering these basics as well:  purpose, focus, organization, tone, and editing. 

Sample Letter to the Instructor

Dear Sheyene,

The reason I took this class was simple: I needed it to graduate.  To be honest, I’d never liked writing much and didn’t expect to enjoy this experience.  However, it was much less painful than I feared and I did learn a great deal.  In this letter, I will be discussing what was most and least helpful in the course.  I will also discuss my own progress and what I got out of this class.

The most helpful aspects of this course for me were the lecture notes and the instructor’s comments on each of my papers.  The lecture notes broke all of the concepts and assignments down into simple terms and steps that were easy to understand.  And you gave me great feedback on all of my papers, pointing out my strengths (which helped to build my self-confidence as a writer) and offering specific suggestions for further improvement.

The textbook was probably the least helpful thing for me, but then I’ve always found it hard to make myself actually read textbooks.  However, I must say that I really did appreciate the approach this course takes to the textbook:  The textbook is a tool.  Rather than reading the whole book (including a lot of stuff that wouldn’t apply to what we were doing), our reading assignments were very focused and always applied directly to the assignment we were working on.

The assignments I enjoyed most were those in which I had total discretion in terms of my topic.  So the letter to the editor and the persuasive research paper were my favorites.  Perhaps, as a result, these were also my two strongest papers in the course.

In my letter to the editor, I discussed the problem of animal neglect and abandonment and proposed a solution, which I called GET TOUGH.  (This solution included several steps, but the real key to my solution involved using the community for outreach and involvement in ensuring animal rights).  As I work in an animal shelter, this issue hits very close to home to me.  Plus, it was easy to get all of the information that I needed to be specific.  My passion came through, and that heart-wrenching story about the basset hound we found in shock would have gotten to any reader.

In my persuasive paper, I focused on the importance of spaying or neutering your pets.  This issue was, of course, very much connected with the topic of my letter to the editor.  Animal abuse and neglect would be greatly lessened if there weren’t so many unwanted puppies and kittens being born to people who can’t take care of them and don’t wish to do so.  I opened up the paper with a series of questions, which I think helped catch the readers’ attention.  And I had a great number of facts such as the current stats–local and nation–regarding unwanted pets and annual pet birth rates.

My weakest paper was the summary and critical response.  I hated that article!  As a result, I fould it very difficult to remain objective in the summary, and I found it hard to keep myself from just going off on a rant against the author in the critical response.  I wanted to keep including words that gave away my position in the summary (such “As the author tries to argue . . ” or “The last point in her useless rant . . . “).  These were inappropriate, of course, so I had to edit them out. And, as I mentioned, in the critical response, I wanted to just talk about how much I disagreed rather than focusing on whether or not the article was successful as a piece of writing.

According to our syllabus, this course is designed to teach us how to compose purposeful writing as well as the nature of argumentation, critical thinking, and persuasive writing in particular.  The course taught me all of those things, but it also taught me something else.  This course taught me that I can be a successful writer and that persuasive writing skills are going to continue to be important for me–in other classes, in my career, and in my personal life in my community.

Words are, indeed, powerful tools.  Thanks for teaching me how to use them.

Sincerely,

John Banks

Formatting Basics:  In terms of formatting, 1-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman font, and double-spacing are the basics that are generally preferred in academic writing.   It is also helpful to indent the first line of each new paragraph.  In terms of the program you use to save your work, Microsoft Word is preferred, but please just let me know if you have questions about other acceptable programs.

Prepare: Prior to beginning work on this assignment, review the Introductions & Conclusions (Links to an external site.) and Annotated Bibliography (Links to an external site.) web pages, and Evaluating Sources (Links to an external site.) and Annotated Bibliography (Links to an external site.) tutorials.

Reflect: Reflect back on the Week 1 discussion in which you shared with the class the global societal issue that you would like to further address. Explore critical insights that were shared by your peers and/or your instructor on the topic chosen and begin your search for scholarly sources with those insights in mind.

Write: For this assignment, review the Annotated Bibliography Formatting Guidelines and address the following prompts:

• Introductory paragraph to topic (refer to the Final Paper guidelines for your topic selection).
  • Write an introductory paragraph with at least 150 words that clearly explains the topic, the importance of further research, and ethical implications.
• Thesis statement.
  • Write a direct and concise thesis statement, which will become the solution to the problem that you will argue or prove in the Week 5 Final Paper. (A thesis statement should be a concise, declarative statement. The thesis statement must appear at the end of the introductory paragraph.)
• Annotated bibliography.
  • Develop an annotated bibliography to indicate the quality of the sources you have read.
  • Summarize in your own words how the source contributes to the solution of the global societal issue for each annotation.
  • Address fully the purpose, content, evidence, and relation to other sources you found on this topic (your annotation should be one to two paragraphs long—150 words or more.
  • Include no less than five scholarly sources in the annotated bibliography that will be used to support the major points of the Final Paper.
  • Demonstrate critical thinking skills by accurately interpreting evidence used to support various positions of the topic.

The Introduction, Thesis Statement, and Annotated Bibliography

• Must be 1,000 to 1,250 words in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA style, as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style (Links to an external site.) resource.
• Must include a separate title page with the following:
  • Title of paper
  • Student’s name
  • Course name and number
  • Instructor’s name
  • Date submitted
• For further assistance with the formatting and the title page, refer to APA Formatting for Word 2013 (Links to an external site.).
• Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice (Links to an external site.) resource for additional guidance.
• Must use at least five scholarly sources.
  • The Scholarly, Peer Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.) table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for an assignment. The Integrating Research (Links to an external site.) tutorial will offer further assistance with including supporting information and reasoning.
• Must document in APA style any information used from sources, as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper. (Links to an external site.)
• Must have no more than 15% quoted material in the body of your essay based on the Turnitin report. References list will be excluded from the Turnitin originality score.
• Must include a separate references page that is formatted according to APA style. See the Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.) resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications.

 

Prepare: Prior to beginning work on this assignment, please review this Sample Final Paper GEN499 for additional guidance on the expectations of this assignment.

The topic of your essay needs to be a global societal problem from the following list:

• Climate change
• Pollution
• Religious conflict and violence
• Rise of artificial intelligence
• Lack of education
• Unemployment and lack of economic opportunity
• Government accountability and corruption
• Food and water security
• International drug trafficking
• Poverty and income inequality

Reflect: Based on the topic that you have chosen, you will need to use critical thinking skills to thoroughly understand how this topic can be a global societal problem and determine some logical solutions to the problem.

Write: This Final Paper, an argumentative essay, will present research relating the critical thinker to the modern, globalized world. In this assignment, you need to address the items below in separate sections with new headings for each.