Midterm Check-In

Dear Professor Cline,

This semester has been quite the interesting one so far.  It has been quite a while since I completed English 101, so the kind of writing that has been required for the compositions for this class was somewhat out of practice for me.  I did take a creative writing class, and have of course had writing assignments in the mean time, but they are quite different from literary analysis.  There are elements of literary analysis that play into the other types of writing of course as well.  While writing history papers, I was required to use primary sources as support, which requires that those sources be analyzed for their intended audience, purpose etc.  Pure literary analysis is different though, and through this class we have be able to use it for interpreting fiction and satire as well as the more factual types of work where it is applied in other disciplines.

One of my biggest challenges has been keeping up with all my classmates blogs.  They have such interesting things to say, and reading their blogs weekly to comment for class is rewarding, but I often don't get around to it until the end of the week.  Sometimes it's very hard to schedule time for school assignments around the lives and schedules of four kids!  I feel that my biggest success however has been my own blog.  I took the summer off from school this year, and spent a lot of time doing something that I hadn't had time to for awhile, reading books that I wanted to read.  Through the blog for this class I have found a way to share not only my assignments, but also the other things that I have been reading, and my thoughts on them.

We have read a great variety of work thus far this semester.  I have really enjoyed the things that we have read.  There is so much that we can take in from reading works from the past as we have been doing.  It's a great way to see how people looked at and understood the world in which they were living in at the time, and to see how they looked at and felt about the issues facing people then.  I tend to like a historical and cultural approach to the reading I do, so I think I really look for this, and have enjoyed that aspect of the reading we have done.  Another really interesting thing about reading historical commentaries is that they can be so applicable to life today as well.  Though we are separated by time, the human condition is often not much different.  Perhaps some of the views and suggestions of the past still hold true, and could be used to help understand or address modern day issues.

My hope is that I continue with this semester that I can keep up the level of work that I have been doing on my blog posts, and that I can improve my composition writing.  Essays are a place where there is always room for improvement.  Even the greatest of writers have editors.  I want to be able to produce work of which I can be proud, and to finish out the semester well!