Marie Dorline Desir

Prof. Jenner

English 1121

Dear future student,

Hello, my name is Marie Dorline Desir and I am taking English class 1121 composition 2. I am writing this letter to prepare you for this class. I am writing to you to tell you a little about this class, what reading assignments stayed with me, and some advise on how to succeed being online student.

First of all, this is an intense writing class. You will write various types of papers like a persuasive letter, a multimodal presentation, and a research paper. Even though the writing is intense you will become a better writer, reader, and thinker.

The first assignment that stuck with me was micro-activity#12. We needed to inform our professor what our research topic was going to be on and why we were interested in this topic. My final research question question was how does climate change affect agriculture and the reason why I am interested in this topic is because I’d like to know why the climate of our planet is going through a change right now. This activity helped me to get my ideas and thoughts together on climate change. I was also able to clearly visualize what I planned to write about.

The second assignment that stayed with me over the semester was micro-activity#14. The assignment was in connection with a research paper that the professor assigned us. As part of the research paper assignment, I needed to include a MLA style bibliography, a summary, a reflection, and a quote on three different type of research articles. To prepare the class for the completed project, we needed to hand in short essay from one article that included all this information. I thought this assignment was helpful because it helped me to put together my research project in small manageable parts. This assignment helped me to learn how to summarize and reflect on a article that I got from our school’s database.

This semester was a little different than my previous semesters because I became an online student. Covid-19 shut down in class learning and it moved to online. I missed being in a traditional classroom for this semester. I missed the face to face interaction between my classmates and professor. For me, taking online classes was more difficult because I had to try and motivate myself to complete all the assignments.

Some advise to succeed when taking online classes is to remember that you can do your work from just about anywhere and at any time. There’s no stress rushing to get to class on time and that’s a big stress reducer. The teacher assigned the class one micro-activity each week. I believe those short essays gave me time to reflect on my ideas before I put them down on paper.

The materials I learned this semester will be useful in my other classes. I believe learning how to write a PowerPoint presentation, a research paper, and even a persuasive letter are all important tools to help me to do better in College. All these different types of writing papers helped me to learn and learning is doing. For example, writing a research paper helped to learn how to investigate a social issue I was interested in. I also believe I am now very knowledgeable about this issue.

Good Luck!

Sincerely,

Marie Dorline Desir