Making connections within a piece of writing, whether it's poetry or an essay or something else, has been a major 'epiphany area' for me these last couple of weeks. Finding interesting words or images, and then drawing lines to other words or images, and then taking it one step further to make conclusions about what the author is trying to say has always been hard for me to do, but these past couple weeks have taught me to take it one step at a time. It's gotten much easier, and will, hopefully, continue to do so.
The way that diction, or single words, can influence a piece of literature is amazing. The level of elevation or colloquialism, the dialect, and the connotations of words matter so much more than I thought. They contribute to the tone (the speaker's attitude) and mood (feeling the reader experiences) of the writing.
As someone who has taken two AP history classes, the essay format of the AP English essay makes me a little nervous, because I'm used to writing my essay and being able to check off bullet points from a rubric. Now, I have to be able to come up with unique interpretations and evidence, which is a lot harder than putting as many proper nouns on the page, as it was with the history essays. I hope that I can get better at writing these essays by reading a lot of sample ones and practicing writing them.
Hey Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteAs a person who’s also taken the Ap exams, I can honestly say I know how you feel about those history ones. As long as you’re able to conjure up some people, places and things, and slap it down then you were all set. It sort of makes you feel like you’re on uneven ground now that someone says that your essays are going to be critically looked at for all the punctuations, analysis and spelling that’s on there, doesn’t it?
Another interesting note on your response is the ‘epiphany area’ that you mentioned. I, myself, never realized there were so many layers to literature, partly because what we are doing when we’re reading like ‘talking’ to the story is subconscious. I believe, the hardest part of this is articulating what we are doing in our heads onto paper.
Anyways, nice recap on the past week’s topics, good luck on your learning experience.
-Tia V.
So this time when I spend two hours responding to all of your work, I'm going to type in the security code so it actually goes through, but you don't really care about that. You care about my response, so here it is:
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about this material being a mind opener. I also found it inspiring how one word can say so much about the overall meaning of a piece. I feel like since that is such a large focus of this class, that it will get easier and easier to spot the significance of words and along with that, the essays will be easier to write.
I know what you mean when you say that this essay will be structured differently than that of a history AP essay, but I believe with time, we will be able to make the claims needed to write an effective essay, so I wouldn't worry until we've hit April. If you still have trouble with it then, panic. Just kidding but really, you can conquer this class, I know it.