Jaidyn's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

When we first started the pre-writing activities, I realized that I was being tricked into doing something that I usually leave to the last minute or don’t do at all, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. But I can definitely see the value in it.  Thinking of ideas is easily the most difficult part of writing. Once I have ideas and substance, tying it all together is a very doable task. And I actually love that we started with general literary sources. I usually hate research because scholarly stuff can feel dense and intimidating, so it was nice to have a different starting point, and I feel like I’ll apply these techniques to future writing projects in other classes.

James' Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

I’ve always kind of struggled with prewriting. I find that my thoughts form more clearly as I write them down. I didn’t do a ton of prewriting for this assignment. Essentially, I thought up of a claim that I liked and thought I could defend, and I went from there. I did find it useful to choose sources beforehand so that I could plan how I would incorporate them into my paper. I didn’t do much other than that, though. I suppose you could say I am a discovery writer when it comes to essays. The downside of this is that I have to do a lot of editing, but such is life.

Eliza's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

If I'm being completely honest, I was a little bit lost when we started reading Ozymandias. I liked the poem a lot, but there wasn't a lot of depth in it for me right off the bat. But after I read through my final essay, I realized that I learned a lot about so many things, just through this poem! And what made it more intriguing to me, was that I learned it all through general resources. It wasn't thoughts that well known scholars had compiled about their experience of the poem, or what they thought about it - it was all things that I had learned about the poem, and insights that classmates had shared. It was fun to be able to put together an essay that was comprised completely of my own thoughts and thoughts of others in the class. And I was able to see these thoughts form throughout the prewriting process, and then all of them came together for the final essay. Hooray!

Alyssa's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

Prewriting is often where I most frequently freeze, without the motivation to continue on to the next stage of putting words down on the page. However, the prewriting and thesis techniques that we used for this writing assignment were helpful in directing me toward one train of thought that I was excited about, and it was consequently easier to write on that topic. The general research we did was especially helpful for me, and largely shaped my main claim. It was a much less stressful experience finding sources and including them in my writing for this assignment than with past essays.

Sophie's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

The prewriting process that we did during and outside of class actually helped me immensely in writing this paper. I usually have the most difficulty deciding what I want to focus on and constructing my thesis. The fact that I basically had my thesis written and ideas outlined when I started my paper made the process go a lot smoother, and I felt more organized than usual. Also, it was helpful having so many sources of research done by my classmates which showed me the value of writing through a shared platform. Overall, writing this paper was a much better experience than I usually have.

Ariel's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

I've found that my pre-writing style has been developing this semester already. It's helpful to know that there are easy to use online databases to find more information than just trying to navigate one side of the library. I’ve also noticed how I work most efficiently when I plot out the structure of an essay, figure out what to say for each paragraph, then work on the sections I know best until I can fully write the paper, and this is great because I don’t have to write in sequential order.

Kayla's Reflection on Literary Analysis 1

Doing the pre-writing for this literary analysis paper helped me to break down the topics I wanted to focus on. It allowed me to spread the workload of the paper over a longer period of time, which gave me a better paper than if I would have just tried to read it and write about it immediately. Learning about Shelley allowed me to assign deeper meaning to the poem. Looking for other resources and information gave me more context to assign meaning to the poem. I was able to easily develop a thesis because I had already done a lot of the necessary research before beginning the paper.