It has only been half of a semester and yet, I feel as though my learning and writing has enhanced greatly. Writing has never really been my favorite, but I would say that I am decent at it. There were rare times in the past where I felt like writing in my free time, and now I have been getting that feeling a little more often. Especially as I run a blog now. I feel as though going through these experiences of writing and drafting, studying analyses, and even messing around on scrabble has helped me toward becoming a better writer.
Starting with the planning, drafting, and revising, would make sense because I am doing that while writing this. This process is very enlightening as it helps me scan through my work and pick out mistakes. Planning what to write about is very advantageous due to being able to know what you are writing instead of guessing along the way. It makes sense to be able to know what you are writing and when you are writing it. This planning leads perfectly into the drafting portion as you know the basic layout of what you want in the end. I know previously I have written short stories that have suffered from lack of planning and drafting. I would start at one point and end up at another, but it would not always make sense when I read it back.
As I have been navigating through these processes, I have been able to examine the benefits. Drafting also gives you a chance to establish your plan. It is like a prototype. It will not be perfect, but it will be a good model for what you want your final product to be. It is much nicer and cleaner than just writing from an empty sheet and leaving the mess that was spewed onto the paper. The revision, admittedly, is something that I have regularly done. It is more of a simple standard that is used to clean the final product up. This is mostly the only thing that I consistently do, until recently where I have discovered the perks of including the others. Even with revision in this class, I have learned better ways to do it. It does not hurt to read through paragraphs multiple times to check them. I used this process to also write my paper on Matt Richtel’s “Blogs v.s. Term Papers.” In this, I studied the piece, planned how I wanted to write it, and revised the final product. It is much easier to do than it seems after learning the full process.
Scrabble is another thing that has improved my intelligence in this class. Every Friday, we get to play Scrabble in English class and that is the whole class for the day. While it is entertaining, it also has taught me new words. It is an easy way to be creative with word creating. For example, Dr. Lucas posts on her blog about different words and strategies that could be used in Scrabble. A very helpful one is the series of two letter words that she posts. Two letter words come in handy because if you want to put two long words next to each other, you can rack up a lot of points by keeping the words close enough for different, two letter words to form.
Another strategy that I have used multiple times was proposed in “A Close Study of the Board.” This game has a lot of strategy along with the requirement of knowing words. The game really makes you think about everything you are doing. Where you place letters could give the other team an advantage or a disadvantage. It would be “unlikely that the opponent will be able to play consonants… on both sides of the ‘l’ or the ‘x’” in the word “lox,” which is convenient because vowels are always one point. So by playing your own consonants next to double or triple letter spots, you spoil their point gain. It is a friendly game and competition that also helps in the long run with team work, strategy, and word building.
Lastly, and what I think has improved my overall learning so far, would be the analyses that we have studied. There have been the more simple subjects that we studied such as the image by Ian Falconer in “From Observation to Implication.” We have also studied more in depth analyses like “Blogs v.s. Term Papers.” The simpler pieces that we have looked at are not actually simple. They are just fully written excerpts compared to other pieces we have seen. These are usually just pictures or comics that we have to describe and examine.
At first glance, there is an obvious difference in the middle of the image of “The New Yorker” cover. The brunette woman sticks out whereas the other women seem close to identical. While this seems pretty easy to comprehend, there are many other deeper parts to this picture that you do not notice at first glance. My mind was blown when Dr. Lucas pointed out that all the blonde ladies had a very obvious “A” on them, signifying that they are “A’s” if they were being rated on a beauty concept presented by Falconer. That was something that I would have never considered and now I have learned that digging into a piece could be harder to spot than a first glance.
For the harder analyses, pictures normally will not do. We study a written piece, in this case, written by Matt Richtel as I stated earlier. Again, I completely missed all of the deep parts I originally searched for. In the beginning of the planning period, I was just writing opinions, but that was not the point. The point of the paper was to write about how Richtel decided to compose and lay out his writing. I tried to comprehend things like, why would Richtel “[end] the article by returning back to professor Davidson[?]” I determined that it is to reinforce an idea that was established earlier. That is at least how I interpreted it. I have come to understand that interpreting these concepts are not always set. There are different conclusions that can be drawn each time.
In conclusion, these different subjects that we have covered in class, have already started to develop me into a better writer and student even in this short time that we have been in class. I cannot wait to continue to see how my writing improves even more. I am also excited to see how these blog posts will bring me more creative outlets to pursue.
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