Month: February 2018

Having written and submitted a portion of final paper, I now realize the immense value of the weekly papers. The idea that my writing should be clear and concise works for any type of writing assignment, whether it is the two to three-page weekly writing assessments, a five to seven-page final research paper, or even just these one to two-paragraph weekly reflections. Specifically, I think the idea of having a well-organized structure is absolutely key to any assignment, which means using effective topic sentences and reusing important words/themes throughout the paragraphs to emphasize the thesis of the paper to the reader. Additionally, taking the extra time to really think through the structure before diving in is massively important. It pays dividends on the backend, as I am now able to save time and headaches later on when my writing gets muddled and my thesis distracted from. Furthermore, I think the problems of not diagramming out a clear dichotomy of logic through the thesis beforehand are compounded exponentially when shifting from short papers to long papers. There are just that many more things that can go wrong when you’re writing eight pages than just two or three, especially considering our topic of choice is that much broader for the final paper: a person’s life quest vs. a theme in a novel. Ultimately, if I take anything away from this class, it will be the idea that mapping out points beforehand and writing with a clear emphasis on your thesis is essential to any college assignment.

After seven weekly papers, I think I have finally found the biggest problem with the clarity in my writing: my paragraph topic sentences. So often am I trying to dance around my point that I end up muddling the point of each paragraph, leaving the reader confused and disinterested. Undoubtedly, I need to focus on creating clear, yet nuanced, topic sentences full of the key words of my paragraph. It is a shame that it took me this long to figure that point out, but I am excited to try it for my final revision paper due in two weeks. It will be my last opportunity for a check-plus paper, so I really need to be able to hit the nail on the head with each point, making the topic sentences of each paragraph even more essential.

As an aside, I have been thinking a lot about the horrifying situation of Beloved. Initially, when I first began reading, I dreaded learning more and more about Sethe’s past. The more I think about it though, I can’t help feeling like it’s an incredibly necessary conversation that we have to have. The heavy and depressing themes of slavery and infanticide are incredibly depressing but are part of this country’s history: to ignore them would be to be willingly ignorant. Debating about Sethe’s split-second decision is a difficult conversation, sure, but one that has a lot of relevance to understanding this country’s past and the horrors of slavery. I, for one, am glad to be given a medium to think about, and discuss, these atrocities in America’s history, and make sure injustice of its kind never happen again.

As a class, we have reached the book that was most excited for, as well as most nervous to attempt to analyze: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Over the summer from junior to senior year of high school, I was assigned to read another of her books, Song of Solomon. This novel was about a young African-American man named Milkman who becomes obsessed with learning about his family’s history and a supposed gold fortune that was buried by his grandfather decades ago. Within this quest was Milkman’s own character development, as he turned from a spoiled and cantankerous teenager into a gracious and well-rounded young man. As he developed, he likewise became obsessed with the action of “flying,” which was symbolic of him being able to escape his toxic relationship with his father and the city of Detroit where he lived. All in all, the book was incredibly moving and beautifully written, but also awfully difficult to understand. Laced with biblical allusions (such as the name of the novel) and other fairly obscure references, the novel really took a lot of effort to understand, even at its most basic level. That is why I’m so excited and nervous to examine this novel with the class. Even having just read the first couple chapters of the novel, I definitely think this novel will be just as tough to understand, as well as just as rewarding when I do. All in all, I am very glad to have had previous experience with her work.

The Seventh Seal presented a new challenge for me in my analysis of themes and quests within this class. Up until this point, we had worked with mediums that was fairly comfortable with: novels, sonnets, compilations of vignettes, speeches. These pieces were all written (or spoken, in the case of the Martin Luther King Jr. speech), using text as the primary mode of communication. In text, conventions of speech, like sarcasm, and movement cannot be easily portrayed, having to play out in the mind of the reader instead. This movie was totally different. Taking place in a medieval Sweden ravaged by the Black plague, the film follows Antonius Block, a crusade knight, through his quest to try to discover knowledge about God, fending off a personified Death along the way. Shot entirely in black-and-white, this movie represented an entirely new medium for me, and its analysis required a much more meticulous approach; I had to focus on set-pieces (i.e. the sun rising in the background of the first scene), light-dark contrast in shots (like the duality of the squire and the knight in the church scene), and seriousness of dialogue, as the squire Jons is particularly sarcastic and jocular. Ultimately, it was incredibly interesting and a welcome challenge. While not my favorite film of all time, it certainly has its merits, and I’m glad I was exposed to it in this context, because I believe I’m a better plot analyst for having watched it.