Coming into Writing 39B, I struggled with analyzing ideas or data that I pulled out of the texts. Analysis was always my weakest tool because I did not know what to say; therefore, in my analysis it always turns out to be a summary of the text. However, besides analysis I also found understanding the reading materials, such as the Luckas’s and Buckley’s short readings, difficult to comprehend. After spending countless hours trying to understand the text, I still did not understand it. The next day in class when we had to discuss with a partner about what we read, I started putting the pieces together and slowly understood what was being discussed in the readings. I slowly came to realize that discussing my ideas and hearing other people’s comments …show more content…
Small groups and class discussions helped immensely in my writings. For the first critical reading exercise I was confused and lost because the Lukacs’s and Buckley’s readings were difficult to understand. Also, I was confused on what Bildungsroman means, but my confusions disappeared after I got out of class. The discussion that I had with the people around me aided me through the two readings and as a group we broke apart the text and pulled out the key ideas, such as the genre conventions that were mentioned. Therefore, when it was time to work on my critical reading assignment my mind was clear on what I needed to write and how to do it. I knew exactly what to avoid putting in my writing and what to remember to put in. In my critical reading assignment #1 I wrote, “One genre convention of the Bildungsroman that Buckley mentions is the idea of social isolation. The protagonist feels like he does not have the freedom of creative thinking. This is seen in the quote, “A child of some sensibility grows in the country… where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination” (Buckley