If I were to compare my past writing and analyzing experience to my present, I would argue that it hasn’t changed dramatically, but it is gradually getting keener as time goes on. As a freshman, in my written communications classes, we wrote long analysis papers on the various stories we read and learned how to compare them to real life in order to better understand and appreciate the stories. For one assignment in particular, we were asked to find a movie and compare it to one of the stories we had read and jot down specific quotes and their locations in the film in order to make our case. Also, in Paul Gleason’s Introduction to Lit class we compared the elements in actual well-known pieces of artwork to the elements in the literature we were reading. So, throughout all the English and literature classes I have taken here since I was a freshman, I was taught that it isn’t enough to just find commonalities between texts but between different forms that are not text based but still tell a story. Because of these classes, I have gained a greater amount of experience with working on different levels of analysis which helps me to write my blogs with greater ease, but I am still learning how to make a more solid argument or how to form a more precise opinion on things without sounding like I am generalizing.
I also have a great interest in films, and I tend to migrate towards the kind of movies that make you think, and force you to watch it over again in order to tie up loose ends. I like when movies jump all around in the timelines and you have to organize it yourself to make it all come together. An example of this that we have all in the classroom have seen is “Pulp Fiction,” which does exactly what I am talking about. These kind of movies sharpen my analytical thinking skills and keep my brain working while I enjoy the thrill of the experience. Therefore, I think that watching these types of films also helps me with my writing in a backwards way because it forces me to write in an organizational and structured manner so that the reader can follow what I am talking about and does not have to read it again to tie up loose ends. I am glad that I was able to take the classes that I took and have gotten to experience the mind bottling films I have seen in order to improve my writing and analytical skills, but there will always be some facet where I can improve upon.
I feel that in the course of writing my blogs all three of the stages of reading development were dispersed evenly throughout my writing. Some of my blogs were clear cut examples of the stages and some overlapped and intermingled with each other. Right in the beginning, my first blog could be viewed as working in the “text-world” stage. I wrote about how our class discussion on women in real times have been stripped of power, and contrasted it to the women in the movie “Moulin Rouge” who had gained all the power over the men at their place of business, with their attention grabbing costumes and seductive bodily movements.
Going along with this stage, in my most recent blog, I reflected on the movie “Brokeback Mountain” and compared the issues of homosexuality then to the current homosexuality issues of today. I used P.A.T.H. as an example which was a club in my high school that included mostly homosexual members, and I talked about how the people in that group fell into a certain social crowds. I then opened it up further to outside of my high school and made the claim that most homosexuals today are finding themselves more accepted in the artistic world because of the way artists encourage expressionist ideas and concepts. Therefore in this blog I turned from the “text-self” stage when I was talking about me and my experience, to the “text-world” stage where I was talking about the rest of the world and where people find the most acceptance. The only issue I have with writing in the “text-world” stage is that I tend to lack in the thorough explanation my ideas and opinions by not providing enough examples, and I end up making myself look like I am stereotyping or generalizing the issues and the people that I am writing about. An example of this is in my pop/high culture analysis where I related it to the movie “Pulp Fiction.” I did acknowledge that what I was about to say would sound like a stereotype, but I made the judgment that “Pulp Fiction” would be a little too taboo for conservative high culture crowds. It was inaccurate of me to say because I didn’t give enough examples of why it would be that way, and I should have thought harder to come up with how it could be part of high culture too, so as to even the playing field. This is something that I need to work on in my upcoming blogs.
I touched on idea of comparing one text to other texts and their forms when I wrote about the gift of tongues in Paul Auster’s book, and when I made a connection between writing a screen play in class to watching the stage rehearsals of the movie “Juno.” In regards to the gift of tongues comparison, I learned about this gift when writing a paper for another class on the religious denomination called Pentacostalism. I took that information into account when reading over certain parts of Paul Auster’s story and used specific quotes from the book that exemplified the connection I was trying to make. In my other blog about the movie “Juno,” I related the exercise we did in class of making our own screen plays to watching the characters in the movie act out what they were reading from their scripts. Making this comparison really exemplified the experience because it showed me an example of the next step in the filmmaking process. This stage of reading development, I think, is the easiest for me because I am constantly thinking of things that I have seen, or read and using them to mirror what I am reading or watching currently.
The only blog that I have not yet mentioned is the one where I discussed how metafiction is shown in the book by Jonathan Lethem, “You Don’t Love Me Yet.” Here I just simply analyzed the term metafiction we were throwing around in class and explored how it was shown in certain scenes of the book. Within this blog I also gave my personal opinion of my like or dislike for the book, and that is the main reason why I categorized this blog into the “text-self” stage of reading development. An entry that can overlap into this category though is the one about P.A.T.H. because I talked about my personal experience from real life with this group in high school and what I observed about the members of the group. Many of these blog entries that I have written can overlap into all or some of the three stages in minute or large ways. Altogether though, I feel that I evenly distributed my writing over all of the stages in different ways.
Going forward from here on out, there are a few things that I could definitely work on in my writing and analyzing. Like I had mentioned before, I need to make my arguments or opinions less one sided and make sure that I use enough examples to explain my reasoning, or find more examples of how my initial observations may be incorrect. I don’t want to ever insult someone reading my blogs, since we sometimes cover touchy subjects, or give them the wrong impression about what I am trying to get across. Something that I think will also help is having more class discussions. After reading Paul Auster’s book and Jonathan Letehem’s novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” we didn’t discuss the reading as much as we did make graphic novels and write screen plays in response to the text. Once we have a class discussion on these works, it releases any questions that I might have and clear up any misconceptions about what the characters meant by their words or actions before I start writing. I would like to stay in the last two stages of reading development for my upcoming blogs and challenge myself to improve where I need improvement. I think the introduction of “blogging” for a class is a neat tool because it makes you feel like your thoughts are important by having your own profile to display them and it allows others to be able to read and comment on them. It also makes the feedback process quicker and easier. I wish more classes would integrate “blogging” into their curriculum.
