Hello 💙 Carly !


It's your Writing.Com anniversary month and I have been meaning to read your Dear Me letter so I decided that today's the day! I have a feeling I'm going to love it! This is a special review so I'll be writing it as I read. You'll get my real time reactions to what I'm reading in your letter. I hope you find this review fun, encouraging and uplifting.


INITIAL IMPRESSION / OVERVIEW:
You wrote a great Dear Me official contest letter.

You engaged my emotions and had me cheering for you in many places throughout the letter.



MORE DETAILED FEEDBACK:

I could feel your stress and overload and wanted to give you a big hug.

I wondered what "LTO" meant? Some kind of teacher position?

I cheered for you and your update on finishing the report cards. Well done, Carly!

I loved the colorful accents you included in your big goal lists.

I liked how you laid out your letter and made good use of white space.

I was sad that you were so sick in December.

You had a lot of writing success in 2022! Well done!

I was sad that covid messed with your ability to connect with people in 2022. It sure is a bugger.

I love your words of the year and motto. Your motto reminds me of a saying that success is on the other side of your comfort zone.

The Ninja Writer's Fresh Start Program sounds interesting.

Yay for you starting the year out well!

I like your idea of ten minute intervals. That sounds and feels doable for almost any task. Sometimes, even just five minutes makes a difference.

You mentioned that your “step counts have been up over 10K most workdays.” Super!

These are excellent lessons learned: “One thing I have learned is that I have to get to my things done earlier each night so I am not staying up past midnight to get everything accomplished. I have also learned that I need to be gentle with myself and start again whenever I start to go off the rails. This way I won't let these goals drop into a forgotten heap.” And you really learned them, too, by putting them into action instead of just thinking about doing so. Well done!

I didn't notice any spelling or grammatical mistakes (or mistakes of any kind) in your letter.



IDEAS TO MAKE YOUR PIECE STRONGER:
In the spirit of helpfulness, I have a few little suggestions to make your piece stronger.

The first is not really about the writing but just that you change "other" in your genre selections to something like "inspirational" or "educational" or something. Should someone nominate this letter for a Quill award, you'd have a better chance of winning in the genre categories with one of these versus "other" because I don't think "other" is a category for the Quills and also readers sometimes search by genre so you might get more readers this way. Just a suggestion though! In the spirit of helpfulness, I'd love to have a suggestion for you but it feels perfect as it is.

I'd recommend explaining the acronyms to your readers. I do know what IEP means and probably most parents will, but not everyone is a parent. As mentioned earlier, I don't know what LTO means. Of course, on the other hand, this letter is supposed to be to yourself, and you wouldn't spell these out to yourself, so I can see arguing either side (spell them out or not). I just figured I'd point it out in case you wanted to cater to future readers.

I seem to remember, but may be mistaken, that you won second place in the Official Dear Me contest with this letter, but I don’t see any mention of it. I think that’s something to be proud of and recommend adding some kind of note beneath your word count at the bottom. The official contests have a lot of great competition. Sorry if I’m remembering wrong. I definitely think you did a great job.

These are just my opinions and suggestions. Feel free to take what serves you and ignore the rest. I really do mean well and wish you every success.

CONCLUSION:
You wrote a great “Dear Me” letter that I enjoyed reading. Well done!

Thank you for sharing your heart, soul, goals and writing with the Writing.Com community!

May love, joy and peace be yours in abundance!
PWheeler




*** WDC Angel Army Review ***



My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .