Reflective essay!
Dear Betsy(my kickass 95 year old pen pal),
As I write this letter to you I find myself thinking about the first day of class. We sit down and the professor asks us what we want to do in the class, how many essays we should write and why, do we want tests midterms?. At first I am thinking to myself that this guy is crazy and how fast can I drop this class. But I go along with the conversation anyway hoping for a turn around. The professor gave us an opportunity to argue why less essays are better and come up with problems that we needed help fixing during the semester in our writing. He never threw away our ideas the entire conversation no matter how preposterous. i knew this would be a great fit and I would learn a lot throughout the course.
One thing our professor says is ask why? What is the purpose of this assignment? It makes you think and actually want to do the assignment and now i ask every professor I have.
Showing not telling is probably the main theme we covered in this class. I have been trying to practice this in letters I have been sending you these past two months have you noticed? We add senses and try to make each scene easy for the reader to picture what is happening. the five w’s that we all learned about in elementary school are actually very important to make your essays easy to read and more entertaining fro the reader. We learned tat if you can answer all five of those and tell what themes you are addressing and the reader can draw a picture for each scene then you probably wrote a great paper.
Most times a professor will assign you readings and you smile to yourself because well you are just too busy to sit down and read a short story which you will not be quizzed on. This class was different. Because I was enjoying the class so much I sat down and read the first article “bird by bird” and I annotated it. The reading wasn't dry and it definitely pertained to everything we were working on. We started off reading a lot of short essays by authors talking about the creative writing process in a for lack of a better word creative way. We also got to write more story like pieces such as excerpts from “the glass castle” and a fictional piece by a war veteran in which we were lead to believe was fiction but ended up being non fiction. This clearly demonstrated the difference between the two.
Betsy, I think you were actually the one who told me to read “Why the caged bird sings” by Maya Angelou. This is a perfect example of creative non fiction and one that I try to base my writing off of now. You can really picture the situation the breaking of the dishes and feel the emotion coming from all the characters, its like you are there. So this brings me to my blog! I can send you the link if you want? I tell you pretty much everything thats in it anyway but I feel like you can see the progress in my writing from week to week. Anyway, Every week our professor would give us a topic on tuesday. Fro example “writers round table”, he gave us three articles: How Can You Create Fiction When Reality Comes to Call (Carolyn Chute, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anne Lamott), and Zen in the Art of Writing (Ray Bradbury) We had to write our first dialogue piece. This was extremely hard for me but luckily we had all connecting articles which made the process go a little bit more smoothly.
We watched a short clip one of the last days of this quarter called “Making a mess”. In this clip we listen to Peter elbow talk about the writing process and a lot of the things he was discussing stuck with me. “abandon the main premise of writing that you have to be clear on what you are writing ahead of time” and my personal favorite “plug in, make a mess” he says “even if i didn't know where I was going, I was going somewhere”. This is so true and I experienced this while I was writing my creative non fiction essay. I came across my topic because of a blog post we were assigned to do.I was reflecting on my week which we had to do once a week and I realized how significant the happenings actually where in my life and how much they were impacting me. My sister and I’s relationship has always been a delicate one and we have been through so much that this month when we finally started getting close again it made it easy to write an essay! It was almost hard to confine it to three pages. And when editing the essay the steps we were given in class were amazing! i wrote more about that in blog and you can check that out.
Not only has this class helped me become a better writer already it has made me a better reflector. I think about themes in my essays which shows what themes are happening in my life.
Miss you! Hope to hear from you soon.
Love always,
Kelsey :)
As I write this letter to you I find myself thinking about the first day of class. We sit down and the professor asks us what we want to do in the class, how many essays we should write and why, do we want tests midterms?. At first I am thinking to myself that this guy is crazy and how fast can I drop this class. But I go along with the conversation anyway hoping for a turn around. The professor gave us an opportunity to argue why less essays are better and come up with problems that we needed help fixing during the semester in our writing. He never threw away our ideas the entire conversation no matter how preposterous. i knew this would be a great fit and I would learn a lot throughout the course.
One thing our professor says is ask why? What is the purpose of this assignment? It makes you think and actually want to do the assignment and now i ask every professor I have.
Showing not telling is probably the main theme we covered in this class. I have been trying to practice this in letters I have been sending you these past two months have you noticed? We add senses and try to make each scene easy for the reader to picture what is happening. the five w’s that we all learned about in elementary school are actually very important to make your essays easy to read and more entertaining fro the reader. We learned tat if you can answer all five of those and tell what themes you are addressing and the reader can draw a picture for each scene then you probably wrote a great paper.
Most times a professor will assign you readings and you smile to yourself because well you are just too busy to sit down and read a short story which you will not be quizzed on. This class was different. Because I was enjoying the class so much I sat down and read the first article “bird by bird” and I annotated it. The reading wasn't dry and it definitely pertained to everything we were working on. We started off reading a lot of short essays by authors talking about the creative writing process in a for lack of a better word creative way. We also got to write more story like pieces such as excerpts from “the glass castle” and a fictional piece by a war veteran in which we were lead to believe was fiction but ended up being non fiction. This clearly demonstrated the difference between the two.
Betsy, I think you were actually the one who told me to read “Why the caged bird sings” by Maya Angelou. This is a perfect example of creative non fiction and one that I try to base my writing off of now. You can really picture the situation the breaking of the dishes and feel the emotion coming from all the characters, its like you are there. So this brings me to my blog! I can send you the link if you want? I tell you pretty much everything thats in it anyway but I feel like you can see the progress in my writing from week to week. Anyway, Every week our professor would give us a topic on tuesday. Fro example “writers round table”, he gave us three articles: How Can You Create Fiction When Reality Comes to Call (Carolyn Chute, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anne Lamott), and Zen in the Art of Writing (Ray Bradbury) We had to write our first dialogue piece. This was extremely hard for me but luckily we had all connecting articles which made the process go a little bit more smoothly.
We watched a short clip one of the last days of this quarter called “Making a mess”. In this clip we listen to Peter elbow talk about the writing process and a lot of the things he was discussing stuck with me. “abandon the main premise of writing that you have to be clear on what you are writing ahead of time” and my personal favorite “plug in, make a mess” he says “even if i didn't know where I was going, I was going somewhere”. This is so true and I experienced this while I was writing my creative non fiction essay. I came across my topic because of a blog post we were assigned to do.I was reflecting on my week which we had to do once a week and I realized how significant the happenings actually where in my life and how much they were impacting me. My sister and I’s relationship has always been a delicate one and we have been through so much that this month when we finally started getting close again it made it easy to write an essay! It was almost hard to confine it to three pages. And when editing the essay the steps we were given in class were amazing! i wrote more about that in blog and you can check that out.
Not only has this class helped me become a better writer already it has made me a better reflector. I think about themes in my essays which shows what themes are happening in my life.
Miss you! Hope to hear from you soon.
Love always,
Kelsey :)