One Last Thing

I tried commenting on other blogs, but for some reason Google says my account is not verified.  I took the steps to verify it, and they said it worked. Apperantly, the people at Google are liars.  :)  So that's why I didn't comment on anyone's blog this week.

LAST BLOG OF FRESHMAN YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D :D :D :D

   

     I can't believe it's already the end of my freshman year! Man, time flies! Well, looking back on all of my old blogs really showed me a lot about how I have progressed as a writer.  From the time I started blogging up until this final blog, I could see how I started out trying to have the best blog ever.  In my “Blog Introduction” I was forcing the words.  What I was saying was meant to sound good, not natural.  By the time I was getting to our Great Expectations blog, I could write much more fluently.  I noticed that as a beginning writer, I wrote about the prompt given.  Most people would think that was a good thing, but to me, that only means that I was not willing to dive into the deeper meaning of what I was writing.  As I said before, I forced the words out of my head, to my fingers, and onto the computer.  Once I became a more developed writer, however, my blogs had much more fluency.  I especially like the one I wrote about connections between Romeo and Juliet and modern day things.  After some consideration of what I wrote, the connection itself made little sense at all, but I noticed how my writing had changed and become much more myself.  My blog as a whole is basically about English prompts.  One of my favorites was writing in either high or low diction, because I could truly be myself and talk how I would in a normal conversation.  Mainly my blog served its purpose in that it helped me develop into a writer that was fluent, natural, and willing to put effort into discovering the hidden meaning in literature.  Monica Dickens said, “Writing is a cop-out.  An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head.  Very selfish.”  The reason I chose this quote is because I this is how I view writing.  Not as selfish, but as a way to escape reality and create a world that is all your own.  I think that part of the blogs purpose was to allow us to really enter the world of another person.  If you think about it, that’s really the 95% majority of what we do in English class.  We read a book which is a mini universe that was put on paper.  Its origin is the mind of another person.  Their thoughts were preserved on the thin pages we now examine.  After reading, what do we do?  We analyze the work.  We study it, decode it, dig out its heart all to find the message that the world’s creator was trying to convey all along.  This is what I loved most about blogging.  The way that we were able to enter into an alternate universe absolutely amazed me.  I love reading, and I will never cease to love it.  This blog has made a huge difference in the way I analyze literature, and the skills that blogging has taught me will help me so much with English classes in high school and through college.

Memories of a Frosh :)

     My favorite English memory from freshman year is the Great Expectations discussion that we did.  I am definitely not saying that it was my favorite assignment.  I am not saying I loved sitting and trying to think of questions or loved reading the book.  I do think, however, that I put a lot of time and effort into this project.  The hours that I spent thinking of evaluative and in-depth questions really paid off in the end, and I think that my well-thought-through comments contributed to the discussion.  I also felt like, in that discussion, I asked a lot of questions and really got my ideas across.
     The gist of the project was having to come up with 10 interpretive and 5 literal questions about Great Expectations and provide answers that were about a paragraph in length.  Being the lengthy, rather intricate novel that it is, I found it hard to come up with interpretive questions that I could answer myself.  After all the questions were written, we had fishbowl discussions where we asked and answered each others questions.  Though I found this assignment to be a more difficult one, I enjoyed the challenge, and I feel like I did a good job overall.
      

Poetry

I have had several good experiences with poetry.  My all time favorite experience is definitely writing my own peotry.  I wrote a poem called "I want to be..." and I absolutely loved it!  I actually wrote this poem after we did our Poetry Out Loud unit.  I realized just how deep poetry could be, and I think I wanted to make a connection like that.  I wanted something that I wrote to have a deeper meaning than just the words on the page, and that's how my poetry began.
     The other way poetry has made a positive impact on my life is being my way to express myself.  I found that whether I was happy, sad, or angry, I could put down exactly how I was feeling if I was writing poetry.  I liked the challenge of coming up with words that rhymed while also trying to convey the deeper meaning behind the words.  I felt like writing poetry has become my way of dealing with some of the challenges in life. 
     When I hear the word poetry, I think of a piece of artwork.  Everything flows and there is connotation behind everything, and like a painting, the colors or words chosen are picked out specifically by the painter to show meaning and emotion.  When I hear the word poetry in class, however, it has a negative connotation.  I feel like there is a lot of analyzing poetry for different terms, and though it's necessary to analyze the poem to discover the deeper meaning, I wish there was less analysis.