My experience in English 202 has been an interesting and informative one. Prior to taking this course, I assumed that I knew what the English major was all about: reading and writing. Both of those things come easily, so I expected this class to easy. What I discovered over the course of the semester is that while reading and writing are indeed central to the English major, there is much more to it than that. My knowledge of literary theory was scanty at best. I had no idea how many different schools of thought exist in this field. I was unfamiliar with the idea of viewing a text through a variety of critical lenses, but now that I understand the concept, it brings new insight to my reading. Having begun this semester with minimal knowledge …show more content…
In my psychoanalytic essay on Jane Kenyon’s “Surprise,” I enjoyed exploring the dark possibilities that I believe lurk beneath the surface of the author’s words. In the essay, I write, “through denial and selective perception, she [the speaker] turns a blind eye to her husband’s suspected infidelities, until finally she can no longer ignore the truth.” These assumptions would be impossible to make if I were using an inward-looking theory to analyze the text. Comments from TA Sarah Kelley and from Dr. Clermont-Ferrand were helpful by pointing out areas where I needed to do some more thinking about my thesis. Sarah urged me to write more informative topic sentences to better express my ideas. The professor prompted me to reconsider one of my statements by saying, “is she willfully blind? Or is she trusting? Is the ‘surprise’ in the poem her fear that her trust is misplaced?” This essay, while I enjoyed the subject matter, was the most difficult to write. Comments like the ones above illustrate how I struggle to clearly explain my ideas in …show more content…
As a returning student, I have not been in a college classroom for about 20 years, so perhaps my memory is faulty. However, I cannot remember ever learning about transition words in the past. Their importance is obvious, however, when I read my papers aloud and my paragraphs do not flow together. Sometimes they seem to be almost separate and unrelated to each other. Using papperrater.com has been very helpful in this regard because it points out areas that need improvement. At the start of the semester, I would run an essay through paperrater.com and receive a terrible score for transitions. By the end of the semester, I was doing much better, and I even received a couple of “good transition” comments from Sarah. Simply adding the word “furthermore” to the topic sentence, “the woman in the poem has a problem with self-perception,” in my psychoanalytic essay made for a much smoother transition. The Purdue OWL website also lists transitional words and phrases, and I consulted that site frequently. Again, I want to continue to improve in this area, to the point where transitions come naturally to me, without outside