Blog Post 2

I think that an important part of every class I take is seeing myself improve over the course of the class, and setting goals at the beginning of the class so that I ensure improvement. Setting goals starts with knowing exactly what needs to be developed and enhanced. After taking the diagnostics exam in the 5 Steps to a 5 book, I noticed that reading, analyzing, and interpreting poetry is not my strong point. I found myself reading the poems and not understanding a single word of what the author was trying to convey. I realized I never interpret complex poetry I read until I start getting asked questions about the poetry, meaning I rely heavily on being guided in the right direction first. Another part of the test I found myself struggling with was the literary devices the questions were asking about. I had never even heard of a lot of them, such as caesura or a metonymy (are those even literary devices?) Some of them I just forgot what they were, such as a paradox.

Although I found a lot of weaknesses, some of my strengths become more apparent as I took the exam. For example, I noticed how easy it was for me to read, annotate, understand, analyze, and interpret the short essay at the end of the exam. Although I got some of the questions with it wrong, I think that may have just been because I was tired of taking the exam and rushed through it (another weakness...). I also noticed that I'm better at questions that include quotations from the passages, so that I can go back and see exactly what the question is asking for, and maybe get some more information from context clues as well. 

Save for my strengths, I do need to improve upon my previously stated weaknesses. I think the easiest one for me to fix would be knowing the literary devices. This might partially be an issue because I haven't had an English class since second trimester last year, and I'm going to be honest, I didn't pay much attention. So for the literary devices, I'm going to look up all the ones I didn't know and memorize the definitions, and then I will find examples for all of them, including ones I already knew, to help me practice recognizing literary devices in passages more efficiently. My next improvement will be to not rely so heavily on being guided by the questions when interpreting a piece of literature. I believe that the first chapter of my Literature & Composition text book can help me achieve this because it tells you exactly what you need to do to analyze and interpret a piece of literature.

The most important aspect of my literary knowledge that needs to be advanced would definitely be my analysis and interpretation of poetry. My plan for this is to use my Literature & Composition textbook to explain to me how exactly to go about analyzing and interpreting a poem. Then I will use my 5 Steps to a 5 book to practice, practice, practice reading poems and understanding what I'm supposed to get out of them. It might take some time at first, but I believe that people can change if they are willing and able, and I'm willing and able to take my literature analysis to the next level and improve my reading of any literary text.