April 26, 2005
Dear XXX,
You do not have any idea on how you will grow as a person and as a student in a year from now. I know you are a bit scared and truly not excited about becoming a U of A student, but I will try to make it easier for you. I am writing this letter to let you know all the things you will learn once moving to America and entering college. You will certainly experience a whole new life here, and you will need to make some changes in your lifestyle. I know that you have learned English since you were about four years old; however, taking your required courses at the U of A of English composition will not give you an easy time. You are definitely familiar with the language, and you can communicate with Americans without a problem, but I must tell you that your writing skills need to be enormously improved.
First of all, the process of adapting to the United States will not be hard and will not take you long. You will be intimidated a bit with the language because you are not used to speaking English in your daily life outside school. But do not worry, since Arizona is very close to Mexico, you will find some excellent Latin friends that will be sharing your same situation so you will understand each other. But I am not so worried about you adapting here, the truly important thing you need to work on is your attitude. If you want to enjoy every minute of you life, you need to see things on the bright side and accept happily your situation. I better than anyone knows that you did not want to come here, that you were very happy back in Mexico. But you knew since a year ago that this would happen, so you better learn to face things with a positive attitude; otherwise you will waste a few months of your life. Do not worry, as time goes by, you will realize that it is not so bad here and you will actually like it.
Now, you will need to focus on your studies because American teaching is not the same as the Mexican one. The teachers here love to put you to analyze things, instead of memorizing them and they also enjoy assigning essays as homework. I know that you do not like to write and that you spend hours in front of a computer trying to figure out how to start writing and what to note down in a blank sheet. Right from the beginning in English 107, you will be assigned to write four papers that will give you some hard time. The paper you will work on the most will be the textual analysis one. For this assignment you will have to watch the film American Beauty and you will have to write a paper about some aspects of the movie compared to aspects of real life. This does not sound like a hard thing to do right? Well let me tell you that you will rewrite it and revise it at least five times and I will tell you why. Here at the U of A, some academic areas have their own method of writing. In the English department, there is a special format and structure when it comes to texts. Back in high school you have been taught that a paper must have a cover sheet with your personal information, and that paragraphs must contain a main idea no matter if at the beginning, middle, or end. Well, rules change here at the University. Here you will be taught to write in MLA format, which will not be complicated to understand or get used to because if you follow the conditions correctly once, you will get it right. But the hard part for you will be the paper’s structure and distribution. For all your papers you will need to use PIE. This means that for each paragraph you will need to have a point at the beginning of a sentence, an illustration right after, and the explanation of your point and illustration. It seems simple but when it comes to making sense between paragraphs and connecting ideas, my darling you have a problem.
As I was telling you, all of your assignments will not be easy, but you will improve amazingly in your first semester here because you will receive a lot of help. Your teacher will be nice and very clear while explaining, and you will get ideas and points of view about your papers from your classmates, which by the way are international students. And this is another great experience you will have as you get here. You will love to share time and cultural exchange with Asians, South Americans, Europeans and African students. You will enjoy having a small classroom full of internationals that probably find themselves in the same situation as you do and trust me, you will all get along very well. This will allow you to feel more at home when there is harmony and coexistence among the group. In 108 things will be a bit different because the group will not be as united as the 107 one, but you will have other good things. And you will also have the chance to work on some principles like patience, tolerance and respect, because you will find out that since the first language of all your classmates is not English, it will sometimes be hard to understand each other. So what I am trying to tell you is not to panic. You will receive help from your teachers, your classmates, and external people in order to complete your essays well. You will have the opportunity to workshop in front of your classmates and discuss papers with them. This will be very helpful for your academic and social development in class. And you will get good grades in English 107, do not worry. I am not sure how you will end with English 108 but you will do fine at least for half of the semester which is the most difficult part of the course.
I believe you are wondering what the difference between English 107 and 108 are, and why do you have to take both. Well, let me tell you that the most important things you will learn in English 107 are the essays structure, the composition and analysis of different texts with a primary text, and the practice of written and spoken English. Whereas in English 108 you will learn writing skills and you will do many exercises for writing improvement. You will also learn to write papers in different genres, not just opinion and informative texts, but you will learn how to write persuasive essays, reflective essays, cover memos, rhetorical analysis essays and letters. Each one of these genres has its particular characteristic that makes it different and interesting from others. Not all of them will necessarily be fun but you will get to learn and appreciate the written word. I can tell you that after taking these courses you may not become a writer or anything like it, but you will identify and value a text of any kind when you read it because you will be aware of the hard and consistent work it takes to write even a small letter.
I wish you the best of luck and I really hope that with this letter I will open your eyes a bit to reality because it is not as awful and complicated as you are thinking. I assure you that you will learn a lot in terms of writing, sharing and expressing yourself with others. You will not regret this experience, believe me; and you will actually be grateful for these two courses because throughout your career you will have to write many more papers. So try to do your best and enjoy while you write because it will be very useful to you always. And remember, you chose to study and learn new things everyday, so whenever you feel stressed out or when you complain about a homework, just keep in mind that your decision was to attend school so deal with it always with a smile on your face, it will make it more fun and easy. Enjoy your future school and lifestyle.
Sincerely,
Yourself.