Post 13

Whew. It has been an interesting semester for me. Some of the things in this course are not new to me as a writer, such as voice, use of details, and sentence structure, but other elements of this course were very challenging. I jumped back into a full course load after being away from school for a decade, and there were many adjustments that needed to be made to my personal time management strategies.  There were some things that are new to me in this course, namely the whole analysis of literature paradigm, and I have never considered doing formal analysis of a book before. I usually read because I enjoy reading, not to manufacture a deeper meaning from literature. However learning to attempt to read beyond the words may be something that helps me in the future, perhaps if I get into politics, or switch to a legal major. Learning the conventions of the MLA style have limited application in the technical degree that I am pursuing, but I’m sure that it will turn up in other college courses before I graduate. The organizational and development strategies are something that I have struggled with the entire term, in part due to outside factors, and in part due to not being inspired by the literature selected for the later part of the course. For me, the most challenging part of this course is the attempt to add depth of meaning in a story that was not written with depth in mind. I have a hard time trying to make things more complex and convoluted than they are by design. It is in my nature and training to simplify, and make things identify on a basic nature. To try to expand a story into a thing of deeper meaning goes counter to everything that I do and work towards. There were many things that I learned in this course, and my writing will be better for it, but this class was very frustrating to me.