Essay Writing: Challenges and Conquests

Essays.. are not my strong point. If I'm given the choice between writing an essay, and shaving a hairy guy's back, I would choose the latter. (ew) Nonetheless, I wasn't given that choice, and so I've had to finish 2 essays this year, and one group essay. As you can see, I'm not an accomplished essayist, but I definitely would say that I've improved since the beginning of the year. At the most, I can say that I now know how to properly embed a quote! What I know about literary analysis, is that its very mind-numbing, and deep. Also, that I'm pretty sure even the authors didn't intend for us to learn about all this stuff as they were writing it. The challenge about literary analysis is that you have to actually believe in what you're writing in order to prove your point. However, when you trudge through the essay from start to finish (at midnight like me), it is very rewarding to press the print button at the end.

I don't think my Romeo and Juliet essay was necessarily my best work. I think there are too many things on the "'B' or lower grade" list that my essay falls under. Most likely, my whole essay just lacks in overall originality; chiefly in my thesis because I followed the prompt too closely. Also, I think I may have lost focus at times, mostly near the end, because as I read over it, I realized that my essay gets progressively worse at the end. This may be because I lose motivation, but also because I just don't focus well at midnight. Lastly, and especially why I'm worried about this essay is because I lack in the transitions; on the essay packet, there was nothing to tell me to write in transitions, so I guess I just didn't do it. Well that's about all I have left to talk about essays - I'm spent on all my literary analysis for the year..

Summer Reading List

Huhh.. Here we are, writing about reading, again. Anyways, summer is coming up and among the peaceful ideas of idle tanning and floating in a lake, the concrete reality of MORE learning is being forced into my mind. It's strange how in the beginning of the year, I was ignorant enough to believe that reading was fun, but then I got to reading Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, and I've begun to understand how truly wrong I was. Reluctantly, I'm trying to accept books back into my life, after unremittingly avoiding reading for some time. It will be hard, but I think I'll start with reading some books by my favorite authors, such as Tamora Pierce and Madeleine L'Engle. These two authors have a commonality of writing many sequential series, and they are all consistently good books overall.

I plan on reading a series of Tamora Pierce books, that I haven't gotten around to reading which is the Beka Cooper series. Basically, the trilogy - set in Medieval times - is about a heroine named Beka, and she is a Provost's Guard for Tortall, which is kind of like the police force of this fictional country. I'm interested to read this series because I liked Pierce's previous books for its romantic yet adventurous themes; of course, I'm not sure if this will have a romantic quality to it, but I have high expectations of Tamora Pierce, and I'm sure this will meet my standard.

After finishing that series, I'm not sure if I have time for another series of books, what with summer school and camps and such, but if I do, I definitely plan on reading Madeleine L'Engle's work. I've already read one of the books of her long series, but I believe I started at the wrong spot, so I will have to go to the very beginning of the series and start over. This particular series is called Chronos, but the first book which I will definitely try to read, is called Meet the Austins. It's a story about a girl named Vicky Austin, who's happy family is dirupted by the arrival of a troubled girl named Maggy. The whole story is built with increasing problematic incidents in each chapter, and though this sounds cliched and ordinary, I'm sure it's a book that is easy to be sucked into, because L'Engle has a classy way of writing that mkaes you want to continue reading.