Response to Course Material (Sept. 9)

The year has barely begun and surprisingly, I have learned a lot, and our class has covered quite a bit of material. I have never really looked at homework assignments as having any meaning or connection to my life, but honestly, the summer work made me look deeper into literature than I have ever before. My thought process while reading Thomas C. Foster's "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" was, "Why are we reading a piece of literature about how to read literature..?" It seemed redundant because clearly, I know how to read literature if I was reading it right then. However, of course, the reading surprised me and showed me the different meanings of various elements found in literature and how to make sense of them. I admit that in the past I have disregarded symbols and ideas in books because I was not sure how to decipher them. In doing the Power Point, I was forced to connect the ideas to pop culture that I am connected with every day. My favorite part was talking about my favorite movies like "The Notebook", "Twilight", and "The Hunger Games" because instead of "Awh! Noah and Allie are kissing in the rain, how cute!" it became "Oh, the rain created a whole new idea and effect in the scene making it more intense." I feel like I became more analytical of movies and songs that I just watched or listened to for fun.

As I went on and read "The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing", I discovered that there are many solid fundamentals that need to be learned and practiced to succeed in writing. This book went into depth about punctuation and clarity and the flow in writing, and I could not help but realize the many mistakes I have made in my own writing in the past. I have always thought of myself as a decent writer, but I know now that I still need a lot of practice.

Now, both pieces of literature that we read had deeper meanings that the title displayed. Both texts took broke apart literature piece by piece and showed how it is not sufficient to just read or write words on the page; you have to know the fundamentals and set them into action. Given, that one book talked about reading and the other talked about writing, but the point of reading both was to bring the two concepts together to make my understanding of English Literature better and more effective.