1. At the beginning of the course, you mentioned two or three aspects of your writing that you most wanted to work on. How well have you met your goal of improving in those areas?
2. At this point, what would you say are your strengths as a writer?
3. What do you need to improve in your writing in the future?
At the beginning of the semester, my main goal with writing was to better understand its forms in order to make my work easier to understand. Through this class and the process of development, I do feel that I have grown as a writer in both analytic and creative works. Also, I think that this class has taught me how to incorporate my own feelings and past experiences to my writing in a way that validates or adds to the piece rather than distracting from the argument.
I still think that my strength as a writer is being able to find inspiration anywhere. However, I have learned that I am capable of taking a piece and analyzing it to the extent that I find new ideas and can also back them up with other facts from the source used. Before this class, my weakness was writing analytic essays, as my inspiration and past experiences caused me to make my writing more flowery than it should, preventing the essay from moving forward to prove an argument. This is quickly becoming one of my strengths as I push myself in analytic projects to incorporate my inspiration, past experiences, and insight of the piece in order to make a captivating project for the reader.
In the future, I think that I will need to re-learn creative writing to a certain extent. I have become so comfortable with analytic assignments and that style of writing, that I find my creative work resembling that style more than its own. However, as I have always been enamored with creative writing and have done my best to avoid analytic essays, I think that this price is well worth the result of being able to succeed when writing anything even remotely argumentative for a course assignment. Also, I still have a long way to go in removing everything from my analytic essays that is not completely necessary or halts the forward movement of the paper. My goal for next semester and any assignments I may receive in other classes is to conquer this challenge and express only those thoughts and ideas that push the argument forward and prove it, moving the reader through the essay.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
What does it mean to understand someone?
Yolland Poteen - poteen - poteen. Even if I did speak Irish I'd always be an outsider here, wouldn't I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it? The private core will always be...hermetic, won't it?
Owen You can learn to decode us.
Translations, 2.1.48
~*~
I think it is fascinating to watch Yolland's love for the Irish land and culture grow throughout the play. So often we see outsiders in literature as nothing more than that: static characters whose status marks them apart from society. In this case, Yolland has more love and fascination with the Irish heritage than Owen, a native to the island. It seems as if what Yolland is saying in the quote above is that he could never completely understand the society, culture and mindset behind the language. He recognizes that, without this understanding, knowing the language would only give him the power of words, not the power to remove his outsider status.
In some ways, it seems as if Yolland has done a better job decoding the Irish people than Owen has. Owen left by choice, and Yolland found himself in Ireland by accident, but the Englishman is the more Irish at heart. While Owen focuses on renaming the locations and takes pride in his work, Yolland realizes that there is something being lost that should be protected. Such a distinction is rather surprising, as I would not initially expect an outsider to realize the treasure being ignored. However, upon further thought, this idea makes sense. Yolland, as an outsider removed from the Irish society, he is one of the only people who sees that there is some act being committed against the people of this country that should be stopped. I can not help but wonder if his love for the culture combined with his placement as an outsider gave him the eyes to see what was being willingly lost.
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