Everyone loves getting an “thatta boy” or in my case, girl.  This is the letter my professor sent on my behalf for a scholarship in professional writing.  I don’t know how much the scholarship is for but any amount is helpful in paying tuition!

~P.

Dr. Travis Kurowski
441 Country Club Rd.
York, PA 17403

April 19, 2011

 To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to recommend Patricia Crider for the 2011 Carraway Scholarship.

Patricia has been more than a pleasure to have in both my Introduction to Creative Writing course this semester and as an interested, enthusiastic writer and learner on campus, who seems to be constantly working on one writing project or another. Patricia has even taken some of her student projects and began publishing online, and so doing what we hope all of our students will eventually do: taking her classroom work and testing it out in the larger world. What makes Patricia a nice addition to the creative writing classroom, is her constant, often quite insightful, commentary on her peers work.

Perhaps more to the point of this scholarship, Patricia is a motivated, intelligent writer—meaning that she is a constant reviser, always open to suggestion and critique. Many beginning writers—in an effort to perhaps prove their talent to themselves, their peers, or maybe even their professors—often have trouble taking to heart criticism and really applying it to the betterment of their writing. In my experience in the classroom, and at our writer-in-residence workshop this past month, Patricia has taken criticism from other writers and applied it to the betterment of her work—such as the use of specific, concrete images (and the right ones at that) to tell her story, allowing us to more fully imagine her world, which is what we want from our writers in the end.

Sincerely,

Dr. Travis Kurowski