Dear Reader,

Over the course of UWRT 1103 I have written in several different styles and
contexts, and for a couple of different reasons. I was most comfortable writing the essays, since
that is the style of writing I have the most experience with, but all the other types of writing
influenced them. As a process, I found the free writes each class to be useful and even fun.
Processing a question or idea by writing my thoughts on it as they appear slows my pace down;
instead of franticly jumping from one topic to another, I have to focus and clear my head a little
in order to get a useful result from the free write. They tie into the critical reflection SLO; for
me the free writes force me to think about how I am thinking to start ordering my thoughts. My
daybook was my most critical element of the class for reflecting on other writers works. Having
to put my thoughts into exact works, definitively down on paper, drove me to distill my thoughts
into a well thought out discussion. This is showcased in my Reflective Thinker daybook entry,
where I focused my thoughts on the entire Why walking helps us think essay into a single
paragraph. The blog was one element that I did not enjoy much. In my mind, it served the same
purpose as the Daybook but with the added drawback of my thoughts being available for anyone
to read. It is essentially a reflection on my daybook entries, just as my daybook entries were a
distillation of my thoughts. I found Peer critique to be useful, not just when I received writing
critiques but when I gave them as well. In the same way that teaching something requires a
better understanding of the subject and makes the teacher stronger at it, critiquing others writing
helped me to understand my own writing and ways for me to improve it. Peer reviewing others
forced me to understand writing conventions for multiple genres, rhetorical techniques, and other
key SLO elements. Each reading, and their associated analyses in daybook and blog entries,
demonstrated a different type or writing or provided useful technical advice. I enjoyed the

former more than the latter, but they all helped to drive me to improve my quality of writing.
The process of researching, revising, and editing my EIP forced me to combine all the other
elements of the class. Initially I began with daybook like work reflecting on what is interesting
to me and why. Then I began research, critically evaluating my sources and their reliability. I
with revisions, I critically read my own work and made efforts to improve it. As I mentioned
before, peer review helped me strengthen my writing by familiarizing me with other writing
styles beyond my own as well as allowing me to make use of the feedback I received. What little
group work I did beyond peer review helped me to try and see my work from an outside
perspective, and integrate others strengths with my own. Collectively, the work I did for this
class drove me to familiarize myself with more writing styles than my own, think about my own
thinking and writing, and improve my ability to write something comprehensible.
For me, my most important work in this class was my Daybook. It is not the most major
or technically difficult assignment, but it is the one I struggled the most with. The daybook is an
inherently reflective work, and I am not an inherently reflective person. It forced me to be
introspective question my own ways of thinking about things. Comparing initial daybook
entries, like the one I have marked as my favorite on the Informal Writing page, to daybook
entries near the end of the semester, I can see the changes in my entries. They become less about
provable facts and writing as a tool, and more about my own ways of thinking or experiences on
a topic. It highlights my evolution as a writer, and that is more important than the extensive
research and rewriting of my EIP or the critical review of my classmates work in peer critiques.
My greatest strengths and weaknesses as a writer remain largely unchanged after this
class. My greatest strength, constructing a technically correct, well reasoned, well researched
argument has never been a difficult problem for me. There are clear rules and lines of reasoning

that, if followed, produce a strong paper. Its an almost mathematical conversion of work and
effort into expression of ideas. My weakest writing ability remains expressing my ideas and
thoughts in writing. The most difficult essays I ever wrote were my college application essays
because they relied upon what I thought about myself and my goals instead of my stane on an
issue. Constructing an argument on an issue is easy. For most popular debates, it hardly matters
what side you argue for, there is strong evidence or other tools for leveraging agreement on
either side. I cant do that when Im writing about myself, there is no right way to do it. I have
made progress thought UWRT 1103, my daybook and this letter are evidence of that, but I
remain far from confident in my ability to reflect on my own thoughts and writing. It is
something I need to continue to improve upon with activities like free writes or journaling in my
future.
After taking 1103, I have progressed at least somewhat towards all of the SLOs. For
Rhetorical Knowledge, I read, understood, and employed rhetorical techniques from allusion to
realism to juxtaposition. I recognize them in what I read, seeing how authors have used them to
emphasize their ideas or communicate their emotions in ways other than directly writing their
feelings down. For Critical Reading, I built upon my education in high school to better evaluate
the its usefulness, reliability, content, and writing style of works. I can critique a poems
rhetorical techniques and evaluate the usefulness of a website for an essay. For the Composing
Process, I have written everything from chatty blog posts to formal essays to reflective daybook
entries. I have read, critiqued and worked with peers on their writings and mine. For
Knowledge of conventions, I have mastered the technical differences between informal and
formal writing, and almost always follow grammatical conventions on first drafts. I get it all by
the final copy. For Critical Reflection, I have written extensively about my own writing and

thoughts. I have critiqued myself, critiqued my old work, and written about how those critiques
have affected my thoughts on writing. I have written out my ideas in an attempt to better
understand them by explaining them. I fell that I have met all the SLOs for this class, employing
them in the writing throughout my ePortfolio.
As I wrote about in the SLO section of my ePortfolio, the translating the SLOs was an
exercise in understanding a subject through writing. I enjoyed the challenge of synthesizing a
committees thoughts into simplified terms while retaining their original intent. It was an
activity I was familiar with; the translation is similar to the precis that I did several hundred
times in high school and at Guilford College as an Early College student.
To me, my topic proposal was an exercise in reflection more than anything else. Writing
the proposal itself was not the most difficult part of the exercise, that prize fell to choosing which
topic to pursue. In fact, choosing which topic to pursue for my EIP was probably the most
difficult element for me. Not the most time consuming or finger-cramping, it was the open
nature of the topic proposal requiring me to reflect on what I would enjoy writing about that I
found difficult. As I wrote about in A Questioner on the informal writing in my ePortfolio, I
found that deciding what I wanted to the criteria for selecting my topic to be was nearly
impossible. Eventually my interest in current events led me to my final topic, police violence
and the controversy surrounding police shootings. I further reflected upon why the topic
interested me to come up with the questions I would answer in my EIP. After the reflection,
actually writing the proposal was easy, almost an afterthought.
The Annotated Bibliography seems to me to be exemplary of critical reading. That was
the whole point of the exercise after all, to read each source critically and evaluate its reliability
and usefulness for the EIP. This too was an assignment I found fairly easy, because I had done

several of them in high school and at Guilford College. The process was repeated analysis of the
documents, checking off certifications and reading for bias. It is a technical skill, as far as any
literary skill is technical, and something that becomes easier with practice. I just happen to have
a lot of practice.
My first EIP draft was a combination of self-critique and compositional practice. Most of
the reflection and research related to the EIP was completed in the topic proposal and annotated
bibliography, the rest requited technical skills in writing and reading your own writing.
Expanding the topic proposal into an outline, answering the questions I asked in it, I had my
initial draft. Reading through it, I found that I wrote with far too much bias to be an effective
exploratory essay, so I shifted the writing to an argumentative essay with that old enemy, the
bully thesis. From there, long practice at writing argumentative essays gave me a solid stance to
make my arguments clearly and cleanly though far from perfectly,
The final EIP draft is the result of collaboration. Not that anyone wrote it besides me, but
input from my peers and Professor Campbell influenced and informed the changes I made from
the draft. Beyond the spelling, grammar and style changes, my reviewers noted areas my paper
was weak such as in offering solutions or strengths that I should work into more parts of my
paper. The collaboration of ideas strengthened my paper by giving me more bases to build off,
more argumentative branches to explore.
The ePortfolio was less difficult than I expected. I suppose I must have become better at
reflection during UWRT 1103 because the reflections on each element of the portfolio came
easier than even my first free write. I wouldnt say it was fun, but it is immensely satisfying to
see samples of my work throughout the semester all in one place and thematically unified by this
letter. I called my ePortfolio Lawe and (dis)Order, because this class has been a lesson in less

orderly writing. Instead of writing in arguments and syllogisms, I learned to write in the messy,
chaotic method of my thoughts. That both made my reflective writing a bit messy and my
thoughts a bit more structured and calm. The ePortfolio is a reflection of that, with each page
having different backgrounds, text colors, and contents, but all unified by layout and structure.
I mentioned earlier in this letter that I thought my greatest weakness in writing remains
reflection. Despite how far I have come this semester, my reflective writing is still far poorer
than my argumentative writing skills. Moving forward, I am going to continue to write daybook
entries on articles or books I read and my academic career in the hope of developing my
reflective abilities further. Having now done a bit of it, I can see how useful and satisfying
reflection can be to me. I want to continue that.

Sincerely,

Thomas Lawe