COM 1100 Unit 5 assignment: letter and formatting

Read this as two assignments in one document, because it is graded that way. The first is reflective writing — completing a letter about how college is going — and the second is a formatting exercise in which the marker checks a specific list of operations. The formatting half is worth as much as the content half and it is the half students lose marks on, usually by leaving something behind. Delete all of the directions, the text in brackets, is a real instruction and a bracketed prompt left in the finished letter is the most common single deduction on this assignment. Read the file once at the end looking only for square brackets, before you read it for sense. Those are two different passes and doing them together is how a placeholder survives to submission, because your eye reads what the sentence means rather than what is on the page.

The formatting specification is short and checkable, so treat it as a checklist rather than as advice. Right-align your name and date at the top, which in Word is one keyboard shortcut with the cursor in that block. Left-align the body of the letter, which usually means undoing a justification you did not apply deliberately. Use the tools in Word to find and correct spelling errors, which means running the spelling and grammar checker rather than trusting your own reading. Save the file as Lastname_COM1100_A2_letter, using your actual surname, because a filename is part of the deliverable here and it is trivially checkable. Each of these maps directly onto the stated competency about formatting a document according to instructions, so working through them one at a time, ticking each off, is the fastest route to full marks on that half. None of them takes longer than a few seconds, which is what makes losing marks here so expensive.

The image or quote step has a small trap in it. You are asked to find something that describes how you feel about college so far, and then to paste the link of the website you got it from into the document. That link is not decoration: it is the assignment teaching source attribution in the least academic setting it can find, so paste the actual page address rather than the address of a search results page or an image thumbnail. Choose something that genuinely matches what you wrote in the letter, since a mismatch between an upbeat quote and a letter about struggling is the kind of thing a marker notices immediately. If you use an image, check it actually appears in the saved document rather than only in the editor, and open the finished file once before submitting to confirm nothing shifted when it was saved.