My strengths in literary analysis lie mostly in the short story category. I know this from the practice test where I did alright on the poems and sonnets, getting about half to three-fourths correct, and then on the short stories maybe only missing one or two questions per passage. I think this struggle may come with my insecurity with poems, because I feel unfamiliar with their forms and get easily confused with the similar structures. I hope to make that one of my goals, being able to aptly identify the type of poem based on its structure.
Something else I had trouble with especially in this particular test, were identifying tones. This is usually, I would say, a strength of mine. Even on those standardized tests we have to take for college, I would never get tripped up with the trick questions, because of my expansive vocabulary, I would be able to label the tone, then match its true meaning with the deciphered choices. And in chapter 1, I will admit it, but I did not pay as much attention on that section, because I felt very comfortable with it. In some of the other sections I made sure to close read and take a few notes to really capture the lesson.
My main secret to success in these reading and analyzing is close reading, and absorbing the entire text in just one time through so I only have to look back at the cited lines, and not the whole-passage questions. And on this test I don't think I did that to the best of my ability, I found my mind wandering a time or two and I had to take deep breaths to refocus. So, getting more rest is less of a literary analysis goal, more of a Bettering-Becca goal.
Finally, I need some serious perspective on authors purpose. Most of the time I find myself getting a completely different idea of what the piece is about! I use the questions as a source for this a lot of the times more so than the passage. This then is where I hit a rough patch with the authors purpose, or for example, "what would be a good title for this piece?" and I end up randomly guessing, just going off which one sounds nice. I very much need to better my understanding of the topic of a poem, because I seem to come up with incorrect interpretations of a difficult text.
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ReplyDeleteBecca,
ReplyDeleteI completely share your sentiment about being more comfortable with prose over poetry. I thought that the first poem in the practice test selection, Now Goes Under..., was especially difficult to comprehend for the same reason you did. Because I didn't know the structure of the poem—in this case a lyric—it was harder to approach it in a way that felt comfortable to me. You’ve also said that you want to improve your knowledge of literary terms. I think that you might want to be a little more specific when setting this goal. The way that I decided to tackle this same problem was to set the goal of reading at least two unfamiliar poems ever week for the rest of the trimester. If you pursued a more explicit approach like this, it might be easier to measure your success later on.
As far as tone is concerned, I feel that we both had problems, though in different ways. Your sentiments seem to be that on this particular test, it was very hard to identify the tone (perhaps because you hadn’t read the section in the textbook thoroughly enough). I think that I, on the other hand, was able to identify the tones within the pieces, but was unable to understand the tone vocabulary in the questions. For example, when answering question number 7, I knew all of the tone words except for “capricious”. I really didn’t feel like the passage matched any of them, so I chose the word I didn't know as my answer. If I had been more familiar with my tone vocabulary, I might have been able to eliminate this word from my possible choices. Thus, I acknowledge that both of us need to work diligently on improving our understanding of tone. You might want to consider the goal of taking extensive notes on all of the chapters in the textbook that we are heretofore assigned to read to help improve your understanding.