Letter to 2025 Self
Written on:
Dear Takeo in 2025,
Wow, the last year of the first quarter of the new millennium is drawing to a close. Do you remember Spring 2023? You had to drive 35 minutes twice a week to attend the classes of ENG 111 and ESL 95. But that worthed. You improved your vocabulary, enhanced cohesion in your writing, and learned how to serve the main purpose of writing using ethos, pathos, and logos, and then, of course, how to incorporate others’ ideas within yours. I’m sure all those had been internalized in you because you’d spent that much time thinking and combatting all the concepts you learned. You felt you grew up to another level as a writer.
Among those concepts, pouring explicit effort into targeting specific audiences and setting a clear goal were impactful. You exercised the understanding of those ideas by calling your audience in appropriate timings in your letter, fully noticing who your audience was. Also, in your language narrative assignment, you put a ‘みんな’ in it, for which you were bestowed a beautiful praise from your professor. She wrote, "it really flared.” This is what you wrote, “A week later, I had a quarrel with my son over the way of a Japanese word: みんな. The word is more or less the equivalent of an English word, everyone.” I found a little flaw in the sentence, but that also shows you’re still improving. Do you remember you deliberately chose the Hiragana rather than Kanji? Although giving a flavor of Japan is not the main purpose of the piece, the insertion of the word helped increase the overall cohesion serving the main purpose, the concept of upbringing and languages.
How is Nobu now? Are you still impacting him the right way? The purpose of the narrative was to recall the past and to tell it to inform your classmates, instructor, and Americans who didn’t think much about other languages. Now you’re in your last semester at NOVA, what would you set as purposes of your writing at this moment and after graduation? In my opinion, this purpose-orientation is an American value materialized in writing activity. As an introverted knowledge worker, you must be sensitive to it. You can achieve your set purposes by raising the language resolution, adopting broader writing situations, and exhibiting versatility as a writer.
The biggest achievement in the semester was your open letter to prospective employers. You could successfully put selected essential personal experiences as a knowledge worker into it. Remember, writing is a medium or vehicle of information. Always try to explain what you’re doing in your mathematics and programming. Those should be your experiences and information to convey at this moment. I’m stressing that point because your mind easily gets dispersed. While being a student, stay focused on math and programming. Hone the skill of explanation with your technical readers and wait. Once you start working, your creativity and imagination will fly, and find another approach using those technical concepts in the industry. Biology and nutritional science will be interesting. The conjunction of all those areas could be the field of your writing in the next 10 years. Can you imagine your new audiences and purposes? Of course? Just align your course a little bit if you feel it’s needed. Then, limit yourself to writing in math and programming. Your current audience and purpose should be restricted to those fields. I’m writing this for your good. You’re not young, so keep focused.
Sincerely,
Takeo in December 2023.
Copyright © 2025 Takeo Shimazu