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.

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Thomas Wilson Eng112 Sec 71 5/17/07

Final Reflection

Dear Tom, “One semester, one attitude-changing class, and several lessons learned later”. This could be the title of your final reflection letter as represented by the change in your life and, more importantly, writing. So many things have contributed to this change, to this evolution, if you will, of the habits you possessed before the class “college writing” took up such a major role in your existence. I say evolution because the change developed, much like anything, very slowly, starting from one point and ending at another. The most beautiful thing about this evolution, however, is that it’s not done. The prominent feature of evolution is that it finishes only once its applied specimen has reached near perfection. Now obviously you have a long way to go to reach that point, but I can say with absolute certainty that this class has started the process, and there are three major elements that are key to this. The first, weird as it may seem, is not actually a source of writing but of technology. The required class wiki which you took a leadership role in taught you many, many things, the least of which being how to use one. However, the bulk of what that simple website consisted of was the hard work of countless pieces of writing that was poured into to, to be saved forever. This experience opened up new aspects of writing that you never knew existed. First of all, anybody with their mind set on seeing your pieces could find them quite easily- with the outstanding job that the wiki team has done with the class wiki, nobody would have to look for too long before they found your stuff. Second, the words you write do not have the same impact as on a word processor. The wiki has its own way of performing the task of display, and to get your message across the same way as, for example, this printed document from Microsoft Word, you would have to pull a lot of strings and enter a lot of letters/numbers, and it would still look different. In this way, one must be careful about how to write for the wiki as the audience might get a different sense of what you wanted to portray than you’d originally managed. The third crucial thing about your writing that the wiki has begun to change is your outlook on audience. The wiki has totally brought you to the realization that who you are writing to makes a huge difference in what your writing style should be. In the wiki’s case, the audience was almost always either fellow classmates, future students of Steph, or Steph herself------ however, the uncertainty of whether or not somebody that happened across the website and would read my writing gives cause to be more careful with how you write- you must be aware of how things will be interpreted by different people, which leads to… …Key number two. This one exists in how you view my own writing and how it was interpreted into the wiki, the class magazine, and other work. Personally, the magazine has very little to do with you- your writing is only displayed once (your identity paper) and in the same form as you entered it into the wiki. I am displeased with all of your writing throughout the semester, partly because of the warning you got from your third reflection letter that “the dangers of poor time management” will lead to your destruction as a writer. However, due to this problem most of your writing was indeed never viewed on either the wiki or the magazine- you never finished half of what you started. Even as I write this, close to the deadline of your final meeting with Steph on a Thursday morning, I am displeased with how I come across. Rushed writing leads to confusing writing and thus probable poor interpretations, and this is what your life this semester, this school year even, has been like. You/I move quickly but only when the time has only come to be finished, and thus my results are twisted, morphing the key of interpretation as badly as my writing truly is. The third key that this class has taught you, though, is that your writing isn’t truly bad. I noted in your first reflection letter that you have a “reasonably well-gifted mind”, and that you do have the knowledge to write great stuff. I stick to this claim. The start of your third paper is quite good, and the plan you had to finish it is also smart- you just didn’t finish it. You do have the capabilities, though, to finish it, and to get your words fitted exactly the way you want them to. You are a “metacommunicative genius”. The words you write can be read as they are, and still have the same meaning. Sure, diction always needs work, but what you write is what you mean, it’s just not written in a way that others will perceive it correctly. The third key has shown you that you are not a bad writer or person. As I write this, buses are moving outside, your neighbors are moving out, the workers are mowing the lawn and your friends are playing ball outside. You are watching the birds chirp, smelling the smell of summer, hearing the sound of music coming through the walls on many of your dorm-mate’s last days. People are moving away, and will come back different in many ways next fall. They will have learned lessons this year and over the summer that will change who they are, and though I may not see any of them ever again, I am one of them, who have steadily learned and evolved over the course of the semester. I have learned my lessons, and will continue to learn over the years- I credit this course as a major role in that process, and the teacher as a major role that I will, indeed, miss. Life is good, but it can always be better. You do good work, man. Good luck in the future.

Sincerely,

Thomas Wilson

Works Cited

Wilson, Thomas. Reflection Letter One. 2006 http://www.umasswiki.com/wiki/User:Tom/Tom%27s_Unit_One_Reflection_Letter

Wilson, Thomas. Reflection Letter Three. 2006 http://www.umasswiki.com/wiki/User:Tom/Tom%27s_Unit_Three_Reflection_Letter