Letter to Dr. Schonberg

Dear Dr. Schonberg:
How are you?
Through out these first five weeks of the quarter, I have learned so much about writing. I didn’t even have the feelings that half of the quarter has already gone until I am doing this Mid-term Portfolio homework.
As a writer, my arguments in the writings are much more clear and powerful. Instead of writing about nothing and going nowhere, my goals are easy to be found. This half of the quarter, we mostly put our minds onto finding arguments from other writings; and make our own arguments with appealing to the audiences. And there are three branches of appeal to audiences: Emotional appeals; Ethical appeals; and Logical appeals. And I enjoyed learning all these appeals with the ways Dr. Schonberg you provided for us:
I had problems with writing my whole life, not because I can’t write, it’s just the horror feelings every time I started writing a paper. I don’t enjoy reading my essays in front of the class or doing anything close to it, because I know that my works are usually worse than any other classmates’.
But at the beginning of this course, our first project was a facebook chatting assignment! One of the BIG rules was not to tell others in the class who you really are as a facebook character. What a surprise to me, I could be able to practice my writing and reviewed by my classmates without knowing who I am. I loved it! I started to learn how to write in a better form. As a writer, I learned to find arguments. Everything is always started with an argument, there are logics behind it. Now I look at writing as doing some logical problems. Following the steps, find the arguments, then tell the audiences if you agree with it or not, and prove it. It is very straight forward if you know what you are going to say.
My first writing assignment was an in-class free writing; I talked about my first year seminar last quarter. I had a long first paragraph, writing about the seminar itself. Second paragraph I wrote about the writings I have done last quarter and then I talked about what I did for writing in high school. The writing ended after I finished talking about nothing, really. No arguments, no my own opinions. It was a lame article I will say. I couldn’t see how bad this piece of writing was when the course first started. I want to talk about the writings I did recently. Facebook project, I analyzed the comments my friends sent me, think about what appeals they have used while sending me the comments. During facebooking, we all learned the ways to chat with opposite sex. Logical appeals didn’t seem too helpful in this case. But emotional appeals were the main prescriptions. Unless you are very into figuring out the true meanings of arguments, emotional appeals would work very nicely. Ethos didn’t work as well as pathos.
Look back to the beginning of the class, I could tell that I am more of a writer now. Knowing how to argue makes me even more outstanding than the others when an argument comes up. I have improved a lot from reading the text book as well as the newspapers. The second project we are doing now is reading the newspapers, finding the arguments from articles. The writers from the newspapers are not as mystical as I thought they were, because I can make arguments to their writings now, so many little things I can break a hole through. I enjoyed making arguments to the writers. My improvements are also related to the reviews and evaluations from you and my classmates. I am very grateful for the comments. They helped me understand myself more, the audiences can easily tell what is going on wrong in this article, but it takes more time to figure it out ourselves because we wrote the articles. From the peer review I found many more of the arguments I could write about as well.
Writing takes skills and practices. With the helps from Dr. Schonberg, and my classmates, I can see myself improve rapidly. The goals for the second half of the quarter are going to be: open my mind wider to accept more ideas of arguments; to be more active to the in-class studies; and write more for the class as the quarter goes by… There are many good writers in my class right now, I can learn a lot reading their pieces, I wish we will have more chances to read others’ writing, but keep the group size as small as possible. I found that the smaller size of the group the easier to understand the purpose of what their writings are about for me. It is not hard to write, if you can catch the right ideas of what you want to write and what you are arguing about.
I am getting even more excited going to my writing classes than the beginning of this quarter. Thank you for your helps in writing Dr. Schonberg. And I am looking forward to actually send an effective essay to the Denver Post editors.

Sincerely,
Sean Hu