Reflective Blog

Reflective Blog

In my first blog, a short piece of writing, (Appositive) I wrote that I wanted to improve my punctuation usage, understanding of tenses and vocabulary. With regard to tenses, I was advised to give it attention while revising papers; the focus during the draft should be on content. In my latest writing, a take-home essay for Introduction to Shakespeare, (Appositive) I wrote “My experience with reading Shakespeare prior to this class is limited to…” I later read the draft for revision, and noticed the incorrect use of “to be”. The essay was written at the end of the semester, and I was looking back to the start of the semester. Therefore, it should have been “… prior to this class was limited to…”

            In the same essay, I made some changes concerning vocabulary and pronoun usage. “After mentioning to friends that I was taking a Shakespeare class, I got the impression that everyone…” Without loosing the idea of what I was trying to say, I changed it to “… I noticed how everyone…” Overusing the relative pronoun “that” is a pattern I noted while reviewing my own writing during an in-class activity. These changes are examples of how I am trying to focus more on content in the draft, and then changing words and correcting grammar errors while revising. As it was said in class, poor written work is better than no work at all.

            My third goal for the semester, punctuation, (Parenthetical comma) entails multiple subjects. While I said punctuation was important for flow, I now understand it is also important for sentence variety. Using dashes, colons and semicolons demonstrates better mastery of the language as well as creating more opportunities for ones writing. Dashes can be used to add information, draw attention or emphasize; the later shown here: “Benedick does not take the courage to ask for Beatrice’s hand in marriage until after the successful wedding between Claudio and Hero—in front of everyone!” (Dash for emphasis) When the dash adds information in the middle of a sentence, it has the same requirement as the parenthetical comma: the text between the dashes can be removed and the sentence will still make sense. For example, “…it was shown that rimes, songs, games and stories in English—which they could associate with familiar items in Norwegian—helped their understanding of the language.” (Parenthetical dash)

            One of the last topics we covered in class was brushstrokes. This was a new concept to me, and it took awhile to make the connection between the term “brushstrokes”, and how it “paints” the text by adding to it. Appositives are nouns or noun phrases that add a second image to proceeding nouns. Participles are –ing verbs tagged to the start or end of a sentence to add action. Noun Absolutes are modifiers-often participles- that modifies the sentence. “The student’s writing, a more technical text than the others, contains…” (Appositive) is an example of an appositive because it adds an image to the noun “writing”. I made a rather poor attempt incorporating participles in the Student Writing Analysis: “Reading and underlining, I noticed how as the paragraphs develop…” (Participle) I find participles to be more suitable in a sentence where an action is taking place, and using vivid verbs adds additional color to the sentence: “Whacking, shaking and grinding, the golfer had a tough day on the course.” (Participle).