I think the
least helpful of the Summer assignments, in my opinion, was reading The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing.
It was just a very wordy explanation of things I’ve already learned. And Harvey
used an enourmous amount of parentheses. I enjoyed reading the Sedaris essay, but
it was very hard to critique without nitpicking, especially because it was a
narrative and the criteria we were critiquing it with were meant for academic
papers.
The Foster book, on the other hand,
made me look a lot deeper for symbols, common themes, and references to other
texts. Many of the chapters were things I already knew about, like the Biblical
and Shakespeare references, but I had no idea how common they were. And others
were new, like the chapter on references to kids’ stories. And I’ll admit I had
some fun with the presentation we had to make.
The first two blog posts gave me an
idea of what to expect in the course, and the forum posts were useful for
getting my mind back into literature-reading mode. Not much effect beyond that.
The terms test was just irritating.
I thought I’d done poorly with my 60% but after talking with classmates, that
actually wasn't too bad. The same quote from V for Vendetta appeared in the test three times. So I guess that
means literary devices are unbelievably common. And there are so many fancy
words for things that can be readily described in layman’s terms. I guess
concision is important so it’s handy to have a word for every single possible
combination of words in the English language but keeping track of them will be
godawful. I’m curious as to what we’ll be hearing in class about it, haha. A
curve would be pretty nice, but I hear a few people did rather well so I don’t
see that happening.
You do a good job at stating the course material that we have covered, but I don't think that you are reprocessing the material. My impression was that you are stating what the material was and if you liked it or not. To help reprocess the material I would give an example of how you applied Foster's information. For example write about a text that has a Biblical reference that you didn't notice until you read Foster's book. Another idea for reprocessing would be giving examples of how you applied "The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing". A recommendation for memorizing the terms is to find passages and then look for the literary terms within those passages.
ReplyDeleteCaroline is exactly right! This blog post is just you summarizing what we have done and what you like and dislike. In order for this blog post to be helpful for you, I suggest going back a reapplying this ideas to the new things that we have done in class. I also noticed how you only focused on what we did over the summer. I would also suggest talking about the different powerpoints that we have looked at in class. Like for example how do the rhetorical situation, argument, and the AP lit magic all relate together? For me, tying all the ideas together is the easier way for me to remember what we have covered.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that you should do more reprocessing of the material. You say that you had fun doing the Foster presentation so maybe you could talk about how Foster's book helped you find examples in unexpected places. You already mention the summer assignments, the Foster assignment, and the terms test so I don't think it's necessary to add the presentations but I think you should elaborate on what you did talk about. When you discussed the terms test it's sounds like all you learned was that you are going to have trouble learning the terms. Reading it through it didn't sound like you really tried to complete the goals of the assignment.
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