Dear Dr.

Sinha,

Still, I have a lot to improve on but, this year has been tremendous in developing my literacy for
the college. At the beginning of the year, my writing practices were not as refined as they are now. My
worst writing traits since the beginning of the year have been bad spelling and I would repeat
information to much. But after the stretch English course allowed me to slow down and work on my
writing process. In the first semester as a class, we worked on grammar and the basics of proper
sentence structure which gave me a better understanding of what I should look for when rereading my
work. As we started working on our essays, you would allow us to meet with you during office hours and
review our essays a few days before the final draft was due. Meeting with you helped me a lot with my
sentence structure. I remember when I met with you for my Problem-Solving essay about White
Nationalism, you gave me positive feedback about my paper content and helped me move the content
around the paper to that it had better “flow”. My favorite paper to write in the Stretch English course
was the Immigration paper. Though most people didn’t like it because of how much research was
involved in writing the paper, I loved the process. I think the research process is my best writing quality,
I like learning the history and evolution of things and how they relate to now-a-day situations like the
evolution in the United States immigration system and how it affects immigrants. Through that piece, I
discovered a writing weakness as well. Because I am so into the research process I put too much
information into my paper. I learned to respect the prompt and that I need to not add too much
unnecessary information no matter how interesting.

Part of the reason I decided to study at Cal Maritime Academy was because of professionalism.
The school teaches its students the in’s and out’s of how to be a professional. The Stretch English class
has given me extensive knowledge about reading and writing in a professional environment. Through
the year we have focused on how to find information the proper way and how to cite it. We learned
about peer-reviewed sources and how to annotate them. We took a lot of time out of the second
semester to look at plagiarism. In my plagiarism essay, I looked at many different cases of supposed
plagiarism and determined that all ideas have been inspired by other people’s. In a professional
environment, I now have the skills to locate reliable information and either cite it or transform it into my
own.

Although I have made huge strides this past year in my literacy, I have a lot more to learn. I need
to drastically improve my spelling and my speaking skills as well as my writing planning skills. I
understand that only practice will help. I have been inspired this year to read more which will help me
expand my vocabulary and advance my overall literacy.

Leaving stretch English is a bitter pill to swallow, I will miss the learning process because I know I
still need to grow and develop my literacy.

Sincerely,

Nicholas S. Stark