I feel that this initial piece of work is one that is heavily underestimated. To me, who has not been a writing class for over two years and did not take the opportunity to take Writing 39A, this assignment in itself was a huge step forward for me. For me, an inactive writer, this artefact served as the next beginning of my writer career, a step forward that I have always wanted to take but have never been able to discard the pride to do so. It offers an amazing opportunity that not only begs the writer to introduce themselves, but also allows each of us to individually gauge our own progress as a writer, so that we will have a place to look back to, to see how much we have learned in the future.

To the class of Writing 39B,

    Rhetoric may be interpreted as an art, involving the usage of words in a certain way for the purpose of allowing people to effectively understand and communicate between each other. While I have not had much experience with the concept myself, I had once taken a class which also involved reading texts from an anthology, many of which fell under the genres of horror and fantasy. That experience, however, was rather simple and only taught me to read the text and to comprehend for the sake of answering post-reading questions.

Though this may be one of the first writing classes that I have taken in over a year, there is still an experience that occurred during my senior year of highschool that retains a vivid memory in my mind, in terms of my progress throughout my writing career. One of the final exam questions was a written-response type question, with which I was supposed to respond with an answer detailing my experiences thus far as a writer, including the events that I considered to be near the beginning of my writing career, all the way up to the then current date. I distinctly remember writing about how writing was, in my freshman year of high school, a concept that I would not underestimate, that it was something that I would follow all of the examples to, to the dot, and then be done with it. Since then, I had learned that writing was truly an art that differs depending on each individual writer, that it is not something to be feared or hated, but rather something to be enjoyed, with the opportunities that it gives any willing writer to fully express their thoughts into words. Despite having realized this, I still continue to face many problems during my writing that I hope to face throughout the course of this class.

One of my most prominent issues with writing is knowing whether or not I have fully answered the prompt or not. Often times, I will confuse myself in the midst of the task and it will inevitably slowly begin to dawn on me that I had just spent the last four hours writing an essay that had absolutely nothing to do with the task at hand. Thankfully, this had not been the case during most of those times, but it still lingers in my mind as one of weaknesses as a writer.

From this course, I hope to learn to better not only my writing, but also my opinion of writing and how its usage in the everyday world plays such a vital role in the processes of communication between one another.