Response to Course Material II--October 9th

 

First and foremost, at this point in the semester, I am happy to say I now feel a lot more comfortable with the different elements of DIDLS, and now actually understand what syntax is.  I find syntax an extremely difficult thing to find in a close reading situation partly because of my entirely limited knowledge of grammatical terms or regularities, but at least I know that I should be finding something.  I have to become more familiar with grammar, and, say, the classic structure of a sentence, because without this knowledge my analysis of syntax will be incomplete and limited to the stress of words at the end of the sentence, and the frequent omissions of the word and.  I also have to work through my reluctance to learn grammatical terms, because while I love literature, I most certainly do not love clauses.

                I also feel more secure with banging out a thesis in a shorter amount of time, but I still feel inexperienced and unsure with writing under pressure and spinning out those arguments fast enough.  If I’m writing an open prompt, I’m okay with the thesis and argument and what I want to say, but I run out of time and end up writing too long of an essay.  I’ll be writing open prompts on weekends, and I’ll say to myself “okay, write this in forty minutes”, but then I’ll get so into my argument I’ll lose track of time and over an hour later I’ll finish, feeling pretty good, and then look at the clock and slap myself.  In contrast, if I’m writing a closed prompt, I struggle to form an argument—without enough time to sit with the text, I still cannot analyze it fast enough, such as our American Dream assignment.  Most of the time my group took up was just figuring out what we thought the play meant.  This was predominantly my fault.  Once we analyzed, then we shot out a thesis, an introduction, and some sentences relatively fast.  I loved this assignment, though, because I found The American Dream an extremely intriguing and funny play.  I have read only one other play in the absurd genre: Endgame, which I did not enjoy nearly as much.  Albee's play had dialogue equally ridiculous, but it was funny in its randomness and the meaning of the play was extremely interesting to contemplate.

                In addition, I feel better but still not great about the structure of the essays, where each topic sentence is an elaboration on the thesis.  I don’t feel badly about it, per say, it’s just a different form than I’m used to, so it will probably take a little more practice for it to become second nature.  Happily, however, it’s not something I’m struggling with too much.  It seems a bit like the five paragraph essay format to me, and I suppose my problem is that the last couple years I’ve had do not hand in to me a five paragraph essay drilled into my head, so adjusting is kind of a U-turn.   But I find it fun to write with different formats and styles because then you’re prepared for any format your professor requires later on, so it’s an enjoyable U-turn, even if the brakes squeal a little bit.