By: Patience Mildenstein
This semester in English class, I have learned so much more about expressing myself. I understood a lot about writing before this class, but because of the free-writes and other assignments, I have realized that I tend to look at things analytically, more than the other modes of reading. Such as when I wrote my reflection paper, I wasn?t reflecting, I was analyzing the article. I looked at the writing and use of certain words rather than what it seemed or how I read it.
The interesting part of that is that I did learn how to look at things differently, not just through an analytical perspective, but a rhetorical, emotional, and personal, even impersonal way. I learned how to look at things through the platonic views, pathos, logos, and ethos. I understand more fully how each of those principles adds value to each and every piece of literature I read. It isn?t enough sometimes to just look at what it says, or why it says it. To look at how it?s written, why it?s written the way it is, what it means, how it feels, what you see and learn from it.
I learned that you can take any one word and expand it into thousands of different intimate and specific meanings. It makes everything that I read now make more sense, and resonate better with me. It has allowed me to look at things in a perspective that I didn?t have before. Works that I had once just took at face value now have a deeper, more symbolic or emotional meaning. I learned that ?leap? can simply mean to jump, but it can mean to fly, to reach, to try, to trust, and much more.
The simplest of words or phrases we take for granted suddenly mean so much more. We discussed value and the meaning of putting value in things. This class has questioned every stereotypical meaning of the English language and all meanings in it. Words and rules that we must or mustn?t use simply because they are the rules was thrown out the window of the mind, and left in it?s place was a curiosity of how I could explore and challenge the stigma of breaking English rules.
Dogmatic rules that tell us that we should write how someone else thinks we should write. I learned this semester that it matters little what the rules tell us, as long as we are writing what is true to us and to the true meanings of words. The meaning of words used to be of little consequence to me in the way of essay writing, but now I understand that word choice can literally be interpreted in a thousand ways.
It makes so much more sense to me now why we even have rules in English about words and grammar, and that is because words are treasure troves of understanding and meaning, if only we go through the process of thinking deeply and studying into the real reason why we use the words that we do in the sentence. This semester has taught me so much about writing for more than meeting requirement, but writing for the heart and the soul. Writing something meaningful because that is what makes English great.
Five Best Articles:
- ?Tolkein, on a matter of Interrogation.?
- ?The Strange and the Beautiful
- ?Fall?
- ?Perfection?
- ?Endings?
