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This semester was my very first semester as a college student. Being the first, it was probably the semester I would learn the most in. I learned the expectations for writing that I will have to live up to for the next four years of my college career. Though my high school teachers were usually demanding because I was in the Honors English section throughout high school, writing in college has still? raised the bar? for me. Also, in high school, we would have weeks to pick a topic, create a thesis, outline the paper, write the paper, and then revise the paper. In college, the time restraints are not quite as lenient. I've had to learn to manage my time and be more productive with what free moments I have. Strangely enough, I've found the college English experience to be much more rewarding and enjoyable than in high school.
Academically, I have learned many new ways to look at literature. My high school teachers did not expose us to many literary theories or how to apply them. Indeed, we learned about romanticism, realism, transcendentalism, etc. but never really related them to our writing. Most of the writing we did was simply based on our own opinions. We hardly ever used secondary sources. I believe that deconstructionist theory was the most helpful theory I learned this year for analyzing literature. Breaking a poem up line by line image by image or even a story into small sections made it a lot easier to grasp the main concepts of the work. Most of the time during this semester, however, I took a formalist point of view.
Also, unlike high school, the reading was much more entertaining. In high school, I enjoyed very few of the texts that were discussed in class. In this class, though, I liked just about everything we were made to read. Even Heart of Darkness, which I despised in high school, did not seem so terrible after we read it. I learned a great deal from our discussions about this book. I did not like it at all until the class sat down and analyzed the many levels Conrad addressed in his story. I thought the endless paradoxes in the book, once brought to light, were very interesting. My favorite section, however, was the poetry unit. I enjoyed the poem. The Blues? by Billy Collins the most because I respected music. I think Collins makes a point in his poem about just how important music is and how it allows people who are very different to connect on many levels. I also loved? Love Calls Us to the Things of This World? by Richard Wilbur. The imagery in this poem was amazing, and I adored how he made ordinary things seem mystical with his words. I loved how the laundry became angels. If only we could look at the world from that point of view more often, it would be a much happier place.
The criticisms in college have even been somewhat enjoyable and interesting to read. I think I began to like the stories and poems we read in class more and more as we discussed them and looked at different authorities. opinions. I found a lot of the information in the databases very useful. For the Antigone research project, the JSTORS database gave me hundreds of articles dealing with my topic. I could narrow down what I was looking for and find numerous scholarly articles. Knowing how to navigate the databases will prove to be useful in my other classes as well.
I feel that my writing improved as a result of looking at so many different styles of writing, theories of analysis, and critics's points of view. It was also very helpful to have my peers look over my papers before I turned them in. I found that my biggest problems were similar to the ones I found myself having in high school. I still tend to be a little too wordy at times, I misplace commas, and I still forget how to properly cite my research sources now and then. I think I have become a little more meticulous about looking over my papers, however. I make fewer careless mistakes and take more time writing my papers than I did in high school. My points of view are clearer, and I have not been using commas incorrectly quite as often. I hope to continue to improve in the next few years of college as well. I haven't received an? A? on a paper yet, so my goal for the next few years of college is to eventually be able to consistently produce papers worthy of? As.? I would also like to apply my writing more in school by possibly writing for New Morning in the future. I think Introduction to Literature has had a positive impact overall on my literary skills.
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