Letter of Introduction

I don’t think there is much that can be said about my background that would be informative and entertaining, short of full anecdotal recollection. I came from the San Francisco Bay Area—Redwood City, specifically—when I traveled up to Humboldt State for my first semester, but I have never really been a city person. One of the major reasons I decided to come to Humboldt State was the beautiful surroundings, both near and far. I love the outdoors, being active outdoors, and bringing my roommate’s dog outdoors. Like many of my fellow students, I love videogames, food, music, and all of the usual suspects. Beyond that, I enjoy keeping up with worldly events (the striving journalist in me, I guess), different aspects of science, and even writing. I believe that, aside from complete, unintentional ignorance to current events, there is no excuse not to be informed about our world and the people who run it—especially with the way that the world has been turning lately. I am very political, but I hate politics. I think Bush was horrible, and Obama is much worse. Moving on, I prefer to keep as environmentally friendly as I can, and I support environmentalism at almost any turn. However, it may come as a surprise that I am one of the many people within the environmental perspective who understand that anthropogenic global warming is a falsity (just to give an idea of how quirky my perspective is to the average person).

As I mentioned earlier, I like to write. Recently, most of my writing has been in conversations over the Internet, or within a journalistic field, here at school, but the writing experiences most important to me are those that I contribute to in my free time: small and large bits of expressive writing, and stories of an initially mindless fantasy that I write simply for fun. Call them useless (because, aside from their affect on me as a writer, they probably will prove to be), but they do have a strong influence on my writing and have certainly been the cause of the more important moments of my literary improvement and influence. These personal works of written amusement may not be the greatest works that anyone has ever read, but to me they are much more than the sum of their letters—at least, if only from a practical standpoint, as they have provided me with untold hours of writing experience, albeit at a bit of a crawling pace.

As far as a writing process goes, I have never retained any particular outline or step-by-step plan to help me complete writing assignments, but I do stick to a general progression. I begin by outlining in my head what each of the bodies of text will cover, sometimes breaking it down to sub-points within the bodies and writing it down, and I use all of that to create my thesis. I then fill in those bones by simply getting started with the first draft. After it’s done, I review the paper to see if I missed anything relevant to the topic, and I begin to correct, rearrange, and generally revise to paper. After a few revisions, depending on what I am writing, I iron out the kinks and it’s finished.

I understand the English language fairly well (although I am far from an expert, obviously), so aside from a few things here and there, what I hope to get out of this class is a more firm grasp on the language. I’m not sure precisely where I need improvement, but I know that I do. In this class, I expect to have exactly that: improvement.