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

My experience here at college in the first semester has been exactly that: an experience. I don’t know what to say to those looking for some sort of letter than includes all sorts of ideas about how I’ve learned so much in this first semester because I honestly don’t know that I can talk about that. It’s like walking into a bar, sitting down and asking the man next to you what he learned in life. He’s not going to be able to answer that question. You don’t learn a set skill in life. It’s not like bicycle riding where you know that that you have attained a level of ability greater than what you previously had known. I’m living and that’s as simple and complicated as it gets.

My life here in college is not as glamorous as I thought it would be. There aren’t parties every night that have hundreds of sexually frustrated, scantily clad coeds knocking down the door to get in. I don’t want that anymore and I’m not sure that I ever really did. My first semester here has been a transitional period in existential limbo. I feel like I have something to prove and I’m not some dipshit high-school zombie anymore. I am discovering that I have purpose in this world and that what I seek is not unique. There are more like me out there. They want to set up playdates to go save the world from bad people like Saddam Hussein and Barney.

I have a new group of friends that are good people by most standards. That’s probably the main reason that I wanted to come to college in the first place. I just like people because every single one is so much different than the last yet everyone is the distinctly similar on a base level. I love interacting with people and watching them go about the attainment of their dreams and desires. People with passion for living excite me and make me happy.

So yes, I suppose I’ve learned something here and there but to ask me to systematically tease that knowledge into daylight is a fruitless endeavor. Like I said before, I’m living and I’m having a good time of it.

I firmly believe that ENG112 has reconstructed and affirmed my previous knowledge. I always knew how to write; that was never an issue for me. I believe that I am walking away from this class with a much greater understanding of what writing truly is. Before I entered College Writing, I saw writing as merely another way to express ideas. This is partially true but in my old ignorant views, I lacked the ability to comprehend how truly impactful writing is.

I’ve harped on the fact that I really could not elaborate on what I had learned in our class because I had not done enough work to really achieve a true comprehension of my progression. I realize now that I was incorrect all this time. It took up until now for me to realize that my source of confusion was because of my own delusion. I have finally realized what writing really is and it is because of this realization that I am able to write this letter.

Merely good writing should get people thinking. Truly excellent writing should get those people to act out their thoughts. I’ve been told all my life that my skills in writing are tools that need to be continuously sharpened as if writing is like preventative maintenance on a car engine at 30,000 miles. This tool analogy, probably created to entice young kindergarten boys like me into drawing correlations between the fun of building construction and sentence construction, was unfortunately carried by my subconscious for all these years. Writing is art. Words are colors and musical notes that, when creatively arranged together, create literary masterpieces that should regarded as equal with any great work hanging silently in the halls of the Louvre.

But it’s a dying art form this thing we call writing. Newspaper readership is declining and an increasing number of people are turning to television to get their news. Even more look to the soullessly short news briefs of RSS feeds on the internet to be informed. People no longer are exposed to truly great writing that inspires the masses to go out and create change.

And this capacity to change, something so subtle that it often goes unnoticed, is what this English course and the concept of writing are about. I still don’t believe that I fully understand what the meaning of change really is. It is something so ridiculously potent that the possibility of it, when it is exposed, drives people to extremes. There has never been a movement for change without a great literary force behind it. It is words that give breath to thought. Nothing is as serenely beautiful as that.

This course has not taught me grammar or spelling; I learned those things long ago. This course has taught me something much more. I walk away from this class in full comprehension of what writing really is. It took me an adolescence and part of an early adulthood to grasp the meaning but I finally have it.