Dear Incoming Freshmen My name is Ella Hesse and I am a freshman at Michigan State University Currently I am in a Writing 101 class which is a prerequisite for all first year students I am writing to you today to share my experiences and takeaways from this class in the hope that they will help guide you through the course in a smooth process specifically my experiences and tips and tricks I have learned throughout the writing process On the first day walking into this class I did not know what to expect but I knew it was not going to be good because writing has always been one of my weaknesses But not even 15 minutes into the class my perspective had already changed I realized this was not going to be the class where the professor just throws things at you expecting you to know what to do Instead our professor considered every student s background experiences with writing and graded based on effort and improvement throughout our papers while also making it a point to thoroughly teach us everything we needed to know If you think you are bad at writing like I did you will realize it is not the complexity of the paper that matters its if you put in the effort to do the best you can If you do that you will feel like an accomplished writer For the first project in this class I was instructed to write a learning narrative I already knew what I wanted my topic to be but I did not know how to start With the practice tools my professor gave me on how to write a good introduction with scenery and character descriptions during class I was able to start the process much easier When it comes to details about character and scenery I am not the best at including them which is what happened with this paper Instead of getting graded off for something I do not really know how to do my professor gave me feedback on how to improve and went into more in depth details of how to structure these in the next project Also for every project we were given time to make a first draft and have our papers peer reviewed which also helped me get new perspectives and tips to edit my story With this feedback and what I have learned throughout this project I was able to meet multiple course goals Some are reflecting on and analyzing my own writing processes becoming a community and practicing listening to the stories of others and consider the communities we are a part of and the places we inhabit and to also use reflection inquiry and communication as learning tools The second project we did was a cultural artifact project This project is where we picked an artifact most important to ourselves and wrote a background story of why it has significance in our lives When going over the rubric in class I noticed that character details and scenery played a key role in this paper I was more worried about this one because of my weaknesses but we did many different exercises on how to add in scenery and details After the first project and hearing my feedback I knew that I really needed to step it up in this paper With the tips my teacher gave me in class I was able to create a first draft that I was happy with Again in this project an important thing that helped me was peer review You will hear me mention peer review a lot throughout this paper but that is only because it has so much importance Getting other people s point of views on your story is one of the most helpful tools you can use Everyone has different knowledge about things so they might be able to help you with something you would not know Something I struggled with in this project was going more into depth on character detail and my interactions with them but I was getting the hang of it more and improved from the first project After this project I was starting to get the hang of it more and enjoy writing because I was writing about things I was passionate about I was able to meet multiple course goals after meeting this project a couple being analyzing and explaining the components of a rhetorical situation and to increasing our ability to read analyze rhetorical situations and make rhetorical choices consciously and strategically The third project we took on was a little different from the first two It was a professional disciplinary literacy project and we needed to research three different types of articles in support of our dream jobs In my opinion this project was one of the easier ones out of the four but that is only because one of my skills is being able to find useful information to back up my thesis At this point I was able to use all the information I learned from the first two projects plus more to make this paper happen Instead of writing this project as a paper we were instructed to write it as a letter This made it harder because I am not used to writing in first person but with honest feedback and peer review I was able to make changes so that my story was all in present tense With all the information needed for this project and the number of sources used my professor decided to have one on one meetings with every student to give us the best feedback we could get This process was the most helpful out of the course because face to face notes translate better than those written online Something that I did struggle with in this paper was in text citations which is a big part of this project After completing this project the course goals I was able to achieve are engaging with different genres modes and writing situation for analysis and practice creating multimodal texts for specific audiences and explain rhetorical choices and composing such products and expanding our research literacies The last project that took place in this class was called the remix project for this assignment we did not write a paper but we incorporated one of our previous papers We were instructed to do any kind of project relating to one of our first three projects An example of this could be an infographic a podcast a video or even a song out of all the projects this one was the most fun for me because I could choose how to present My remix while also being able to create something more than a paper that I was passionate about If you can be creative this is the project for you This project was shorter than all the previous ones but that is because you are going further in depth into something that has already been created As I said before I had certain expectations coming into this class and they were not good ones But after every project was finished I started to feel