Looking Back. At The Beginning Of The Semester I Can Honestly

I have truly enjoyed writing for most of my life and after this class I will continue to enjoy writing hopefully with more skill. I have always viewed myself as a fairly strong writer and this class has reaffirmed that for me, but it has also shown weaknesses in my writing. As an introduction level class this has been one of my favorites; at some point I will take a higher level, even though it is not required for my major. Even though this class is almost over I am continuing to learn. I also love that this class will help me with literally ever other class in my college career. I am not a particularly strong reader, but as my writing skills improve so do the reading skills. While in this class I have learned a lot about everything from what I can improve, to subjects that interest me, and constructing a successful paper.

The approach to the reading of the novel would be varied. It is anticipated that the class study would begin with a shared reading of the opening chapter to foster students' interest. A prepared reading by the teacher is usually much more involving than a hesitant reading-around-the-class activity (Sykes, n.d.). The aim is to motivate each student to read the

In his piece entitled “ Disliking books” Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, tells his story of how with some helpful insights he shifted from disliking literature to enjoying reading and analyzing the texts. The author shares that during his early school years he developed an aversion to literature as well as most liberal arts disciplines for not being able to find their application in his daily life. Coming from a middle class family, it was expected that young Graff would go to college. Since no particular discipline really interested him and his family did not own a business to set him up on a successful business path, he decided to major

During sophomore year, we’d practice annotating, and analyzing poetry for inspirational purposes and to perfect our craft. Poetry is my

This book was atrocious and wasted a good majority of my life. The body of the book was tedious, but got better as I read. The information presented became more interesting. I started to somewhat like to read it. It was still boring, but was something that I might like to read. As I liked to read it more and more. In the end I still didn’t like to read but it was a bit more standable.

The poem by Billy Collins entitled “Introduction to Poetry” was a really great opening to the new semester. When I think of poetry I think of something that I hate reading, don’t understand, and is extremely boring. Since elementry school I have had to recite poems for the annual contest. I have had extreme stage fright, those emotions have now correlated with poetry itself. When Ms Davis first introduced this unit at the beginning of the second semester, I was dreading it. It did not seem to turn out like I expected, I enjoyed this unit a great deal.

Throughout the many years I’ve attended classes, I’ve always been taught to find the purpose of the writing or the theme of the literature. Much like Francine Prose,whose aptly named, I disagree with this method of thought and teaching. Breaking down complicated works of art to an easy-to-understand sentence takes away from the author’s intent.

I found it hard to get mentally involved with books let alone interested. My relationship with books were as close as I was with people- distant and far away. Reading to me was torture and if any other teacher dares to pull out Green Eggs and Ham again to feed my “reading appetite” I'm going to barf. I’ll admit Green Eggs and Ham is a masterpiece conveying the basic emotions of human irritability and persistence all in one simplistic rhyme scheme is admirable but not passionately relatable. In fact, the book made me feel indifferent and causally annoyed after hearing the material recycled by teacher and students. I felt no emotional interest or bond to Sam’s or Dr. Seuss’s words. All the children's books were annoying and not even faintly interesting or relatable to me. As a result, I consumed mass media until one fateful poem led me to love reading and my own voice.

In my class I feel that I have learned how to delve within a text and root out its deep structural meaning. For our final exam we discussed two essays whose central theme was about noticing things outside your own personal bubble. Originally I had a more general meaning of what both essays meant, and was able to comprehend that the theme was not to be self centered and to notice things other than yourself. They also both discussed that if you continued to get worked up on the minutiae things in life you would live a painful, lonely, and miserable life.

Literature affects and reflects our lives, literature can make ones respective towards reading more powerful. Literature is what makes reading meaningful. They take us on an experience which we may or not experience in our lives. The message through the novel always makes a person’s outcome. As a result, we would make a personal connection. We may choose to see this personal connection and the experience through reading a novel. Making connections with a character in the novel is always leading us in a path where we are more aware of the importance of literature.

I must say that I really do have a greater appreciation for literature now than what I did in the beginning. I came into this course expecting to have to say things about stories that I didn't really believe. For example, in "Say Yes" the gray dish water could be interpenetrated as symbolic of a gray dull uninteresting marriage. However, in my opinion the dish water was said to be gray because that’s the actual color of used dishwater. I think there were several examples of getting things out of the story that the author didn’t really intend, and that was one aspect of literature I historically didn’t care for. However, after reading stories particularly “The Swimmer” I still think this, but weather the author meant for things to be interpreted in such ways I really had a fun time trying to decode each story and trying to get my own meaning from each one. I think how good of a time I had writing stories that I got my own meaning from was surprising. I

The first thing that surprised me when taking this class was the idea of Gothic literature. Before taking this class I had never read gothic style novels and had never considered it an important genre. However, after reading all the books we read in class I realized that gothic novels are extremely good at analyzing important themes like humanity, morality, and religion. I also really liked the way that they used sarcasm in a lot of the book or exaggeration to point out the problems in our society. I also learned a lot about analyzing form and looking at things like context, intertext, and subtext which I had never done before. It was also important to analyze different modes like watching blade runner and comparing it to the book as well as

To tell the truth, at the time I was registering for this course, there was nowhere on the course title that stated graphic novels. It simply said “introduction to fiction”. So you can imagine how surprised I was on the first day of class when you handed and read the syllabus to us. I had never read a comic book or a graphic novel much less take a class on any of them. I kept asking myself whether I was in the right class. The length of the syllabus and the course load did not help matters either, and I remember you telling us not to get intimidated by the contents of the syllabus and that once we get started, we will realize that the workload is not as heavy as it looks on paper. But even that did not help to calm my nerves, because I attempted

Looking back on Poetry out loud, I believe it was a great and also scary learning experience. There was a lot I did right from practicing my poem and performance for weeks but there was also things I did wrong that I can learn from this time. We started with picking a poem. I chose Come into Animal Presence by Denise Levertov I would have done this a lot differently. I came to like my poem a lot, however I do think I could’ve done a better job picking it out. I did it rather hastily, and I picked one of the first poems I saw. I am glad that the poem ended up relating to me and I was able to connect with it. Looking back, picking a poem this hastily could have ended in disaster. After we picked our poems we were asked to recite them in class. The first time I read it in front of a class, there were two words I could not pronounce. The two words I tripped up with were insouciant and guileless. It took me a couple of days to be able to

1.      Think of your past experience with reading and fictional analysis - what do you love about reading and debating a good story - what don 't you like - how do you think this class will hone your reading and thinking skills.