This week was really focused on being selective. The Poem of the Week being one by Emily DIckinson entitled I felt a Funeral, in my Brain. While we were analyzing the poem we focused one day completely on imagery. There are so many types of imagery-auditory, olfactory, gustatory, internal, tactile, kinesthetic, and visual-that I never really had focused on one type of imagery before. When you actually look at every type of imagery you start to realize that poets and authors alike use only selective types to help convey to the reader what the speaker is saying.
In my past reading choices I have always preferred to read books that are full of visual and auditory imagery; however, I am very selective in what I choose to acknowledge from the imagery that is given to me. I usually have visuals in my head of a scene location or a character, so when the author describes something contradictory I will ignore it. After paying attention to the specific types of imagery, I have come to realize that I should not selectively choose to pay attention to. Each piece of imagery is placed to have a meaning and if I ignore pieces that do not match in my mind I am ignoring the speaker and changing the story. Being selective is usually seen as being picky in today’s world, but after being selective in what I was reading/looking for today really allowed me to gain new knowledge. Each piece of writing has specific literary devices that work together to create a piece of Literature and when authors are selective in what they choose to include and exclude there is a reason they did so. In looking at the selectiveness of a piece and then forcing myself to be selective in what I looked at, I was able to see that being selective does not always mean being picky.
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This week was a very interesting one, and not just because it was homecoming week. We spent the majority of our time devoted to writing our comparative essay that we had planned the previous week. I struggled just a little bit finding the motivation to actually want to write the essay just because my mind was on homecoming planning overdrive, so this essay being a group essay was nice to have other people to help bring my brain into focus. While writing the essay I did find that I was having difficulty bringing together all three of the books (The Waves, Caramelo, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor) and connecting the themes and ideas that we had discussed in our prewrite. All of us agreed that we were finding ourselves writing a synopsis of what happened in each of the books rather than analyzing them. Later on in the week when we had the opportunity hear from Josephine and the questions that those in the writing center at Central use to help edit and improve their peers’ writing. I found this pretty helpful, but I still feel like I was struggling to contribute to my group and the essay in a way that would make it an excellent essay. I think it would be helpful for us to try to edit papers that don’t belong to anyone we know because then we would gain more experience in editing papers so we could feel more confident in our papers. Other than wanting more practice in editing and revising I feel pretty good about the essay we worked on throughout this past week. This week class periods flew by, and I wished we had more time. On Monday we received The Eagle, a poem by Lord Tennyson. This poem we visited Monday thru Thursday and we were presented with a question to help us focus on literary devices used by the writer to help create the speaker’s voice. Through these questions and discussions with others a new layer to the poem was exposed. Being able to see all the different interpretations of the poem gave me new eyes and ears for the poem and has helped me to start enjoying and analyzing poetry more. After we discussed The Eagle, we also started to discuss our chosen summer reading books. I was grouped with Emmy and Erica and we read How to Read Literature Like a Professor, The Waves, and Caramelo this summer. We all found the books very interesting, fulfilling reads that challenged us. We also discussed how we had a little more difficulty reading The Waves due to its constantly changing perspectives, which made it difficult to know whose mind we were in throughout the story. We did discuss how the overview on Spark Notes did help clarify what perspective each part of the story was told from. After our group discussed the books individually we began connecting them and laying out the outline of our comparative essay. I don’t consider myself an excellent writer, but Emmy and Erica are pretty strong writers. Hopefully they will help me to improve my writing through this project! I am looking forward to seeing the progression in my writing this year! This week was the first week of school. It went just the same as any normal first day of schools does, reading syllabus after syllabus and doing basically doing anything to get out of taking a certain class. Basically the day was very monotonous but AP Literature and Composition did stand out in that we went outside and did an activity to help us remember things we did not want to forget. I really liked going around in a circle and sharing those things with the class just because it made us realize that we don’t know everyone as much as we thought. We have known each other since kindergarten or seventh grade, most of us have had the same classes since then and so we know each pretty well; however, that activity showed me in particular that we may not know each other as well as I thought. After the first day of school we started to get into the swing of things, starting each day off with a poem read out loud, reading for our independent reading requirement, starting our creative writing document. The one thing that really stood out to me from the daily routine was the poems that were read each day. I don’t really read poems in my free time so having them read out loud really opened my eyes at some of them. The two poems that really stood out to me were Remember How We Forget, by Shane Koyczan and The Summer I was Sixteen, by Geraldine Connolly. These two stood out over the weeks poems because they in a way wrapped up the summer and got the ball rolling for the school year. |
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March 2017
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