Kerry-Anne's Blog

For this final summative assessment, we were asked to analyze a career of our choice in writing. I chose to do mine on the work of an editor. To demonstrate the work of an editor, I edit the piece of a fellow classmate, Mackenzie McLeod. I enjoyed this project because although we practiced editing our peer’s work throughout the entire semester, I knew there was still much more to learn about what an editor does; they have many more jobs than what meets the eye.

As I completed the prompts in this course, I realized that once I set my mind on something, it was very easy for me to get lost in my work. I originally believed this was a good thing because it allowed me to get a lot of work done in one sitting. I soon realized that if I did not look through my own writing and monitor what I was writing, I would lose my characterization. I found it important to have a plan and organize my thought process to make my work more coherent as well as having someone look over my work (be my editor) as they helped me stay consistent too.

I think the first learning cycle was the most difficult for me. I have always enjoyed writing short narratives in my spare time, but this first learning cycle was when I was presented with new lessons to incorporate into my work and I found it difficult to adjust. However, like everything else in the world, I had to adjust to the things I was taught throughout this course.

Learning cycle two presented another challenge; poetry. I never had a great appreciation for poetry and did not understand how people saw it as a way to express their feelings and emotions, but I quickly found that appreciation. It was for learning cycle 2 that I wrote the first poem I was really proud of, After So Long. It allowed me to reflect on my experience with anxiety and depression throughout high school. Each shift in the time frame was about how things only seemed to get worse for me each year and although I have yet to reach the last stanza, in which things get better, I still have hope that it will.

I really enjoyed the prompts of learning cycle three. After tapping into my emotions a bit more for learning cycle 2, I was able to create a more emotional piece for the first prompt. For the summative assessment for learning cycle 3, I wanted to work more onon keeping my characterization constant and improving dialogue. I think the tools and skills we were taught in learning cycle 3 helped me a lot with this prompt and allowed me create a piece that I was pretty proud of overall.

It has been difficult over the course of these learning cycles to come to terms with my writing. It is often something I do not share with others because I never feel that something is truly my best work. I never feel that I am ever really done with a piece and I just always want to continue working on it to make it better. Overall, this course has given me more confidence in my writing. It has taught me that I am capable of writing more than just what comes to mind, but that I am also able to write prompts to practice and enhance my skills as a writer.

This course not only helped me in my own writing, but also in my writing for other courses. Seeing different peer’s interpretation of the same prompts has allowed me to exercise my thought process to look at prompts and assignment questions with a more innovative touch. I will continue to use what I learned in this course to improve every piece of writing I make in the years to come.

This was a difficult unit for me. I wish I could have excelled in it. However, circumstances made it more difficult for me to do that. During LC2, I enjoyed editing the works of my peers. I wished to continue to work on editing during this learning cycle as I knew it was something that could still use improvement, but unfortunate circumstances and not much cooperation from peers only allowed me to edit one other person’s work. I feel as though my own work suffered from this as well. There was a personal matter that had taken a lot of my time away from school. I am glad to say it is over with and I was able to resume my classes as normal and undistracted, but I do know it put a damper on my mark due to the work I missed. Despite this, I still learned a lot from this learning cycle, like fiction and nonfiction, the hero’s journey, character, and dialogue.

For the first writing prompt, I chose to write about a drinking and driving accident that had occurred to my father. It was very emotional for me because I had never had to go over what happened so extensively before. It took me days to go over the story again and again with my mother to express it the right way. I wanted to ask my dad about it to get a better effect, but it is still extremely difficult for him to talk about. When I was younger, he was always hesitant to tell me what had happened to him, so instead he would tell me about the extensive lengths the doctors went through to “put him back together.” Looking back, I wish I had decided to rewrite this first prompt for the summative instead. I think it would have given me more opportunity to grow because I am more uncomfortable with writing non-fiction.

The hero’s journey was our next major concept. For this second prompt, we had to write a story that followed the hero’s journey; with a maximum of 1000 words. The word cap really strangled me. I often get over imaginative and make a story more complex than it really has to be. Overall, I think I developed a really great idea though. An orphan girl on Earth who is really from another planet. Her mother visits her every now and then, and when she is old enough, she takes her back to her home planet to help take back the crown. It is a story about coming to terms with your roots and who you are truly are at heart.

The third prompt presented a challenge for me. As I said earlier, my imagination goes overboard sometimes. So this prompt became more fiction than creative non fiction very quick. I started off basing it off the time my aunt took my cousin to the zoo, but he ran off on her because he wanted to ride the animals. Taking into account that I had to include certain items though, I could not leave it so simple. Instead, the kid was picked up by an angry elephant and swung around until distracted with a peanut. I was kind of disappointed because I knew it was not my greatest work.

The fourth prompt was based off of an assignment we had completed early where we had to create a character sketch. I enjoyed this because I really like creating new characters. This prompt allowed me to explore my character, Dae. She revealed to her fiance that she did not wish to marry him and that she would leave the country in order to get away from their arranged marriage. Although I finished this story and used the polished version for my summative, it will never truly be done in my mind. As I was reaching the end of the story, I thought about how these characters would grow closer and what they would eventually decide to do. I only really experienced this kind of… attachment… to characters of other books I have read, never of a character I had created. It made me quite proud of myself that I created a character someone could become attached to.

This learning cycle had its ups and downs for me. However, I am still grateful for everything I learned throughout it. It possibly could have been my favourite Learning Cycle, had things gone a little more smoothly in my personal life as well as with my peers. Overall, I believe the knowledge I have gained and the new experiences I have gained will help me to better myself, in both writing and my overall character.

In this learning cycle, we discussed various types of writing and poetry. The types of writing we looked at were poetry and prose, which included what makes a poem a poem and the language, sound, and structure of a piece of writing. The types of poems we focused on were found poetry, concrete poetry, and spoken word poetry. We looked at figurative language and the impact of using “decorated” words, versus getting straight to the point and using words everyone can understand without needing the time to interpret the message of the piece. Using various prompts, we exercised these skills in order to improve our writing.

Found poetry is created by taking a selection of words from a prose passage and combining them to create a whole new piece to form a poem. Concrete poetry is used to emphasize the meaning of poem. This can be from the spacing and placement of the letters, or the size and colour of the letters. Spoken word poetry is read with attitude that reflects the poem’s meaning. The performance of spoken word poetry projects the feeling of the poem in a greater way that the audience of the piece would not sense as greatly if it were just being read. Each type of poetry can impact the audience in their own way if used correctly.

What makes a poem a poem is that is has the ability to make someone feel the emotion of the piece. A poem is more complex than a prose passage because it is more decorated in a way that makes the reader think more deeply about the meaning. The sound and structure of a piece of writing is very important because it can add alternative meaning and emphasize the reader’s interpretation of the piece. For example, when we looked at the Suppose Columbus poem by Charles Suhor, the hidden meaning to that piece being written backwards was that it was the opposite of what happened in reality.

I am not particularly fond of poetry so this learning cycle presented a struggle for me. I do not appreciate things that rhyme, and I do not always see the ulterior meanings easily in poetry which can sometimes frustrate me when the words do not seem to flow coherently. For this learning cycle, I chose to develop prompt #4 further. This is because ultimately I believed it was my best piece and thought it was the one I could work with the most in order to improve it. I I added more emphasis to the progression and feeling of it by adding some more descriptive words. I wanted to show instead of tell exactly what this piece is about so that people could interpret the subject a bit differently. Overall, it ended up pretty well in my opinion.

I need to continue to work on editing the work of  my peers. This would include giving both positive and constructive feedback. I was unsure of how to go about critiquing some aspects of the poetry that I still do not quite understand. For example, I had a hard time with concrete poetry whenever there were brackets and words broken up and scattered in a way I could not interpret easily. Again, this is probably due to the fact that I like things that are laid out in a straightforward manner and are coherent to read. For the next learning cycle I would hope to be more active in the editing of my peer’s work.

In this learning cycle we focused on a variety of writing aspects in order to give us skills to improve our writing. We focused on showing rather than telling. This enhanced our writing because it allowed us to intensify our characters emotions by showing with action rather than telling what they were feeling. Another thing we worked on was maintaining a consistent voice throughout your writing. This gave us the ability to stay true to our character’s feelings and emotions. We were also taught about how to know how to direct our writing to a certain audience. For example, you would not write the same way in a journal as you would for a formal format.

We were given several prompts in order to practice these skills. These prompts that we wrote were shared and edited by a small group of classmates. This was another very large learning aspect for me because I am not used to editing or having other people edit my work. It was perhaps the most difficult part for me. As a class, on padlet, we discussed how to be polite about editing another student’s work and how important it was that our feedback was constructive, not harsh. This helped because it outlined the types of things we should be commenting on and watching for in our own work as well as our peer’s work. I’m only really used to checking other’s work for grammatical errors so on the next learning cycle I would like to work on assessing their work better.

For this summative assessment I chose to rewrite the third prompt. This was a bit difficult for me because writing it originally for the class’s collective storytelling, I had put in what I had believed to already be my best work. However, for the prompt, I did not want to just regurgitate my exact words only in third person rather than first person. This made me disappointed with the outcome of the prompt when I first wrote it. It was a lot less vivid and expressive than when I had written it in the first person perspective; this is why I chose it to expand and improve. I was much more satisfied with my finished piece.