I have really enjoyed being in this English 102 class. I believe I really learned a lot of new material and had the chance to practice what I learned. I think that probably the hardest concept for me to grasp was the idea of literary analysis. I have a hard time doing any sort of analysis; I’m just not the type of person that can easily find the hidden meanings of work. I still tried my best and was able to come up with something. I really enjoyed learning about how summarizing work is not analysis. In high school, the work I had to analyze, I’m pretty sure I just summarized it. I now see a very distinctive difference and will not make that mistake again. If I am doing a analysis, I sometimes still find myself wandering into a summary, but now I can identify what I am doing, and fix it. Also in this class I really enjoyed reading different poems and short stories. The poetry of witness ones were very descriptive and different. The, “Song of Napalm,” by Bruce Weigl was probably my favorite. It was different in its own way, but very enjoyable. I guess the poem can be seen as a very gruesome poem, but I enjoyed it. It was an excellent example of poetry of witness. I really liked reading The Handmaids Tale also. I wish I could have been able to finish the story. I was like 30 pages from the end, when I left it in a bag in my jeep, and the bag was stolen. To be honest, I wasn’t even bummed about the other stuff in the bag; I was bummed because I couldn’t finish the book! I really enjoyed the paper that went along with the book. At first I thought it would be difficult to do, but I found the research very easy to find and comparing the story relatively easy. It was very interesting seeing how this society the Atwood created was alike the Nazi society created by Hitler. Also, book was very interesting just because of the society. The author created this society with her own imagination, and her own twists. It was just interesting reading about how the people lived, and how the government had such control over the citizens. It’s just awesome that Atwood created this society and how realistic it seemed while reading the book.
I believe my writing has changed during this class. For one, I now completely understand how to do in text citations and how to cite different information from different sources. As for my writing style, I think I am stuck in the way I first learned. I utilized outlining in every paper I wrote. I have come to realize that outlines are possibly the best prewriting tool I can use. It works for me. I usually do it on paper, and I sometimes have a hard time figuring out my hand writing, but it still works. I love being able to move things around and kind of see my ideas and how they fit together. If someone else were to come up and try to read my outline, I doubt they could figure it out. My outlines look like a messy web of words and lines and things crossed out. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that I can even use them, but it makes sense to me. I liked how in this class we would post our rough drafts and have someone else look over them. At first, I thought it was kind of weird having someone I’ve never met reading my papers, but I got over that pretty fast. It really helped having someone’s opinion that was totally unbiased and all that. I think this semester my writing has changed. I now write longer, more descriptive introductory paragraphs. It’s just something I picked up and I really like how it is making my papers. I think by doing that, it is giving my writing more of a hook and catching the reader’s attention more quickly. It has been a very good semester in English 102, and I enjoyed every assignment!
