Maddi's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

The assignments we had, such as researching with general literary sources and commenting and discussing our ideas with our peers, really helped me as I wrote this essay. It felt like it all came together before I started writing it! Our prewriting assignment, where we took a formal approach at analyzing and annotating the poem, and then looking at that with the research that we and our peers had done, helped me to get comfortable with my ideas and formulate a plan. Before I even sat down to write I already had my these, my claims, and my evidences to back it up, making the writing process much easier, and really helping my paper to stay focused and clear and concise. In the future, I would like to take a similar approach to writing any kind of analysis paper-- especially discussing my research and ideas with peers!  

Annie's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

This was the first literary analysis paper that I had worked on in sometime and so I found it helpful to work on the thesis and use that as a map for my whole paper. What was new for me with this assignment was using the general literary resources. Doing research through this means helped me to find out a lot of broad information about the poem under different topics surrounding it. I found that doing this research added more ways and directions in which I could analyze Ozymandias. It also just helped me appreciate what I was analyzing and the author more—as I did the research I become more intellectually curious about Shelley and his contemporaries and how their writings influenced each other. 

Estephanie's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

In the past, my teachers have tried to show me that putting some thought into a paper beforehand can help speed along the writing process. I never truly understood that concept until this assignment. When we were asked to find two sources based on a certain topic and piece of literature, it was easier than I thought it would be. This really helped when I had to actually start writing the paper because I could use those quotes and know where I wanted to go with my paper. This was the first assignment that made me fully understand how useful it is to put thought into a paper before you write it

Savannah's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

When starting a paper, I always thought it would be easier to just dive right in and grind out my paper however this assignment proved me wrong. With the research done in steps beforehand it made choosing my topic so simple. I didn't have to spend extra hours on top of the writing process doing excessive research. I also found it helpful to find a few quotes that applied to my topic and go off of them to see which one sparked the most interest in me. I think the next time I write I will be definitely doing a similar prewriting process and putting in the time to research before I developed my thesis.

Matt's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

I have never done such in depth pre-writing. At first I was uncertain how helpful it would be. However, after taking a lot of time to look into some general literary sources and looking at the literary devices in the poem, I found that ideas came easier to me when deciding what to write about. Not only that, but organization became easier and so did writing a thesis. I really enjoyed learning about what everyone was writing about in class and I felt that sparked news ideas when I finally deciding on a topic to write about. In the future, I will try to do pre-writing like this to ease the writing process.

Magda's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

In the past I've never really done interactive pre-writing but it was incredibly helpful! Reading my classmates' blog posts gave me ideas that I'm not sure I would have found if I had just done pre-writing alone. It actually helped me decide where and what to start researching, so I wasn't researching while searching for ideas but actually had ideas before I started researching. The hardest part was probably getting the pre-writing into a draft form because I had so many ideas and no idea how to organize them. I ended up making an outline before drafting, which worked pretty well.

Hannah's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

Prewriting was very essential to this paper for me. I felt that I was able to think of ideas, but it wasn't until I started writing them down in pre-writing that I felt I was able to have some clarity in my thoughts. Also, as I was pre-writing I felt that I got more and more excited about my chosen analysis and this motivated me to continue to work on my paper. The main aspects of pre-writing that really helped me was the paper that we filled out where we organized the different points that interested us the most in "Ozymandius", and then I began by listing my main claim and then my writing out my supporting analysis. Another aspect of pre-writing that really helped me was all the class discussions that we had, and hearing other people's ideas and the challenge of my own ideas.