Tainara Candido
AP English
Period 3
Over this past year in AP English with Ms. Clapp, I have learned to read critically and analyze every detail of a story. A tree is never just a tree especially when struck with lightning, and when it rains, it’s a rebirth. A symbol is lurking around every corner and this past year in English I’ve learned to observe every detail of anything I can. It’s made me a more careful reader and I now obsessively annotate every piece of writing that I lay my hands on. As a writer I’ve noticed that I frequently use the words that Ms. Clapp has handed out occassionally for the class to use over the year and my analysis has also become stronger over the year. Over essays that I was recieving lower grades in the beginning of the year, I am recieving higher grades now because I am able to more effectively express myself in terms of literary analysis. There is more flow to my literary analysis, it is better understood and written stronger in general. However, I know that my strengths lie in poetry analysis and my personal or creative work is stronger than my literary analysis when I analyze short stories or literature.
I think that as a writer over the past year, my weakness lie in my literary analysis, but I have improved over this time. In the beginning of the year, I was not a very good writer of analyzing short stories or catching onto the tone or even ironic undertones of a story. The first essay I had written for irony, I wrote that, “Jorge Luis Borges, author of The Gospel According to Mark, incorporated irony as a literary technique into his short story to establish an ironic Jesus in the form of the protagonist, Espinosa, who unintentionally gives his followers permission to crucify him.” I did not understand at the time that I wasn’t explaining how he was incorporating irony and I never answered the question of what an ironic Jesus contributes to the story. With most of my literary analysis essays, I focused on the technique and the point of the story never truly showed up in my essays, I didn’t focus on the story as a whole and its meaning. Throughout most of the irony essay, I summarized the plot instead of analyzing the plot, “Through his reading of the Gospel According to Saint Mark, a book of the bible, Espinosa unwittingly teaches the Gutres family he is Jesus Christ and confirmation is seen through his miracles. Espinosa preaches salvation to them but they misunderstand that salvation comes through the form of the crucixion and must be repeated with Espinosa.” I’ve improved in that as my literary analysis, as shown through my research essay, I analyzed the life of Daniel de Souza instead of merely summarizing his life, “Daniel is a man who has been described as serious by everyone who knows him and since the beginning of his life, he has been highly disciplined, and his time spent in Aeronautics with the army has helped him carry his discipline even further. Being born as the oldest in a family of five, taught Daniel a tremendous amount of responsibility.” Instead of merely summarizing his life, I have added to the summary and analyzed why I thought he has gained a tremendous amount of responsibility and how. As seen through that short sample of my research project, I have also learned to make my literary analysis flow a bit more, instead of being caught up on complicated words and making no sense.
Certainly my strengths lie in my poetry analysis and personal works as I have recieved high grades for all of these and find these to be the easiest to write. In my poetry analysis of the poem, the Author to Her Book, it was one of my first poetry analysis but also one of my best. In analyzing the poem I siad that, “the speaker of the poem “The Author to her Book” by Anne Bradstreet likens her book to a child to demonstrate her complex attitude towards the work,” to explain the comparison that Anne Bradstreet is making and what effect that causes. I went on to describe the technique the poet was using, “the poem’s controlling metaphor is that of the author and her book compared to a parent and their child,” and then further stated what the controlling metaphor does to give meaning to the poem,” to express the speaker’s resentment , embarrassment and disappointment towards her work. The metaphor depicts the speaker’s internal struggle as her feelings are conflicted by other feelings of affection and pride for her work.” I consider poetry analysis as my best work and the evidence is definitely an example of my best work. My notebook entries also express how careful of a reader I am and that I am able to pick up and allude to other literary novels in the entry, “Apparently, “Mughal Emperors” would donate their limb for a large nose like that of Aadam Aziz’s. Where in the Iranian culture, a large nose is a symbol of ugliness and must be surgically altered, for the Indian or Kashmiri from what I’ve read so far, it is a sign of power if even the emperors are envious. “Mighty” and “colossal” were words used to describe his grandfather’s nose and the narrator called it his “birthright” in what I assumed to be a proud tone for his nose.” Not only do my strengths and weaknesses lie in my poetry analysis and strong reading skills able to pick up on subtle context clues, I feel as if my creative works are also very strong. In my college essay, I was able to express through my words a concrete image of my immigration to America, “The plane ride to America lasted several hours and seemed endless, my childish excitement exceeding my patience at the time. I repeatedly looked out the window to observe the clouds and fantasized of my new life in America. I worried about making new friends in a country that I didn’t know and a language I didn’t speak.” I was able to adapt from one style of writing, that is the abstract of poetry analysis, to a more concrete foundation of instilling an image of immigration in my creative works.
Over this past year, I have improved as a writer where my weaknesses lie in my literary analysis. I have learned to become a more efficient reader that would not have been possible had I not taken this class and am able to pick up on subtle allusions and symbols in a story. In the strenghts that I held, especially in the area of poetry analysis, I can only say that I continue to carry those strengths with me and I am forever improving. Wherever my weaknesses lie, I have learned to create more of an analysis as shown through my research project of my biography and I have also learned to create more of a flow in my literary analysis to more sensibly demonstrate my ideas.
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