Ivan Jesus Gonzalez

1013 Norellat Rd.

Henderson, Nv 89011
702-883-7269
February 16, 2015
Cady Olsen
Writing Specialist
Writing Center
1021 Paradise Hills Dr.
Henderson, Nv 89002
Dear, Cady Olsen
As a Nevada State College student I am concerned with the simple fact that the rest of the
freshmen including myself are not necessarily experienced with this form of writing. First of all I
would like to thank you for reading my letter on what should be done with student writing. The
form of writing that we are all familiar with due to our English classes is APA formatting. One of
my biggest concerns is that students were not taught how to format in high school. The main
point of my letter to you is to explain the status of student writing, as well as what I have found
during my study after interviewing a professor and studying the writing of my scholarly
classmates. It would be in the schools best interest to teach and implement APA formatting.
For this study I chose to interview a biology professor who provided conclusive
information that will remain unknown due to privacy issues. I also gathered multiple papers
including my own from classmates that range between several courses offered at NSC.
Since enrollment at NSC I have written multiple papers and I would consider myself a
decent writer that strongly believes in the content of the paper over the length. After taking a
look at them I can identify a few errors that are common. I mentioned earlier that formatting was
one of the main problems in student writing. When it comes to learning something, repetition is
key and the same goes for writing. A few of the classes that I took last semester were
Anthropology 216 and Sociology 101 and I noticed that the papers that I wrote failed to have one
thing in common and that was APA. The essays for sociology had more of a MLA style of
formatting, with the basic header and footer at the top of the page. While my papers for
Anthropology had little to no formatting with a simple title and name. The main point is that for
most of these classes a proper format like APA was not assigned and students work was based
solely on content. If I had no prior experience with APA formatting essentially this would not be
a problem for those classes but other classes like English do require you to have some
knowledge. The thing that intrigues me is that we enter college with only a sense of header and
footer style of format but nowhere near APA style and the same applies to the rest of my
classmates whose papers I studied. Although formatting is not the only thing that concerns me,
grammar and spelling is huge when it comes down to basic writing. Of course if my papers
weren't edited then who knows how many spelling errors or grammatical errors would slip by. I
know that many people who aspire to succeed in writing would certainly take advantage of the
tutoring opportunities, so I would recommend that you teach APA to students as well as
implementing it in their papers.

As for my classmates I realized that they too were having the same issue throughout their
papers but in different classes than the ones I was taking. The main detail was that a majority of
these papers lacked constant formatting and it varied by course. So what I found was that either
these professors weren't implementing APA or handing out a correct template for their class.
Most of the papers were plain MLA formatting and also didn't have a proper format. When
looking at the spelling and grammar there were little to no mistakes so it appears that most
freshman writers have that down but there are others who lack it. Most of these papers lacked
proper sources as well and this is such a big deal because the way your sources are cited can
determine whether your paper is seen as plagiarism or not. These students should be taught to
implement APA in their papers because then they will be able to cite correctly in one single
format and not just using their citation machines.
While interviewing the professor from the biology department I found most of the
information very fascinating. One would believe that there would be no need for proper
formatting like APA in a biology class but this is false. This professor in fact does implement
APA formatting for the rare occasions that essays are required. Although there was some insight
brought to mind when discussing this topic and theres more to it than just formatting. One of the
questions that was asked during the interview was How important are conventions, grammar,
spelling, and capitalization in your student writing? The professor responded by saying that
these are very important and just like formatting it isn't stressed enough and I completely agree.
One would think that a college student would know when to capitalize the letter i and this
brings me to a realization that its not that the student isn't familiar with capitalization but that
laziness catches up with one to many students. She then stated Uh I dont think its that they
dont know, I think its from being careless or they dont want to work a little bit harder but its
very important because that is the right structure of writing anything, biology, and English. I
could not believe it but the participant of the interview claims that it is very important given that
its the correct structure of writing in general. I then continued to ask more questions regarding
the style of writing required for the course like what resources are required for writing in the
class, the straightforward answer was pretty much a basic knowledge of writing. This professor
gives the students an APA format for references and template and assigns them to write their
essay in an introduction, body, conclusion style of formatting.
I am aware of the fact that students who plan to stay at this college must take CEP 123 as
a prerequisite for graduating in the future. I took this class last semester and we were taught
many things but surprisingly APA formatting was not one of them. The essays that were given to
us had a template but this template was nowhere near APA. Well since most students are required
to take this class then it would be great to persuade the professors of CEP to move this into their
lessons plans. An alternative to this idea would be to start a writing workshop for those who are
willing to take their writing to the next level and have hopes of succeeding in their classes when
a prompt is placed in front of them. Again thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
Sincerely,
Ivan Jesus Gonzalez

Reflection
When writing this letter I was very stuck on how to go about writing it at first but then I
took a look at a few other letters in general and decided to go off of that. I then tried to
incorporate all of the questions into my paper by making them three separate parts. Even though
the letter doesntt feel complete I wanted to make sure and get as much as I could in there so it
would be enough to be considered a rough draft that way I can go off of the newer ideas that
come to mind later. I first began by talking about my challenges as a writer and my formatting
throughout multiple papers. I then talked about my classmates papers and what I studied on their
papers. Following these topics I explained the interview that I had with the biology professor and
the things they said about formatting and grammar and spelling. As soon as the feedback was
provided I was able to go off of each question and improve the content in each paragraph. More
ideas came to mind as well when writing this because I then figured out an alternative when
having to teach APA that instead of each professor having to go out of their way to teach their
students. The required class to graduate here at this school should offer this into the lesson plan. I
believe that my formatting for this letter well was put as well as the content put into this letter.