Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Dear Dan,
For the unit one essay, my original first draft discussed my move from Iowa to Pennsylvania as a defining moment in my life. I talked about how it had made me into a shell of the person I once was because of my inability to make friends and fit in with the people at my new school. It was 75% bullshit. I was rereading the essay in order to write a second draft and I didn’t like that I was lying to the reader and in doing so, I was lying to myself. I quickly tore that essay up and went back to the drafting board.

When I was beginning unit one, I thought that I needed to find a stand out moment that altered my course of life in order to define myself and since I didn’t have one, I manufactured one using the move as the catalyst. It was during my conference with Steph that I realized that there was no need to have a stand out event to define myself around. I live a good life. It’s not incredibly exciting, but I’m surrounded by good people and I have fun doing what I do. I decided that this would be what I would write about. I chose to base my essay around the Abraham Lincoln quote, “Most folks are about as happy as they make their minds up to be,” because it held a lot of truth in my situation.

I went through a phase when things were not as great and I let it get to me and I became depressed. But after realizing that I could have whatever mood I wanted, regardless of the situation around me things started to change for the better. I had never read this quote before writing this essay but I ran my life by it. What I used to say instead was, “mind over matter; if I don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Something I discovered from this essay is how difficult it is to write honestly about myself. I had a lot of trouble with every aspect of this essay because I was the subject.

This was the first time I’ve had to write about me and I found it especially difficult to think about myself from outside my own body. I only know me by being me and I’ve never had to step back and think, what does mean about me as a person. I also learned a lot about writing rhetorically. During high school I had never put much thought into who I was writing to. I would write my essay and that would be it. Adding the layers of audience and ethos, pathos, and logos will make my essays a lot stronger in the future as I learn to integrate this into my writing more and more.

In the end, I am not satisfied with my first essay. It hasn’t come out how I would like it to be yet and I will have to continue to rewrite it until I am content with the finished piece. I am not happy with it because I don’t believe that it gives an honest description of me unlike other essays where I don’t care about the subject matter. The subject is me and I would like to be presented honestly.