More than one way to read?

The reading strategies helps you read many things better. It gives clues how to read for different purposes. The first strategy it talks about is to skim over the text first, looking at pictures, titles, vocabulary. I can relate to this because I have been doing this for years. The first thing I do when I have a reading assignment is skim over the chapter before I read it. The only thing different about what the book says and what I do is the book says to not stop to look up the vocabulary words, just keep going. I usually skim over the chapter and read the vocab also. Another strategy it says you can do is to jot down notes as you go. I believe this would help greatly it's just hard to get motivated to do it because it just seems like more work. Annotating seems like it's more for me. It is just quick notes on the margin or highlighting as you go. Before reading this text I had no idea how to outline a reading assignment. I knew how to make outlines for a speech or writing assignment, but not for a reading. I now understand what it means to outline a reading and it sounds like a pretty effective tool. With our text analysis coming up the ending of this section helps a lot. It gives good questions to consider while analyzing a text. This will be the first place I go when I start my paper.

Text analyzation opening it's doors to me

Chapter seven is all about properly analyzing text. I found the first passage about Hotel California quite interesting because before i read the analyzation of the song I never really thought about what the song actually meant. I always thought of the song as praising California but I now know it says it can be a great place and a bad place at the same time. I didn't really know what was being asked of me when asked to analyze text. The part of this chapter that helped me the most was where it said read, respond, summarize, analyze, and draw conclusions. This gave me a good basis of what to do when asked to analyze a text.

Textual analysis. This section starts off with Denise Noe comparing and contrasting country and rap music. She makes several good points. She talks about how they are similar, which before I read this, I thought there was no way they were. She talks about Hank Williams Jr.'s song where he talks about hunting women. I never realized country subliminally talked about things like this. This is not a good thing to sing about but it does compare the two genres in a way. One of the passages confused me. Peter Stiglin analyzes some paintings and I didn't really get what he was trying to say. I sort of understood that he was saying we do not actually stop and appreciate what nature has to offer in terms of its beauty but sentence by sentence I was lost.

Regardless of understanding these passages or not I think I now have at least a little bit better understanding of how to analyze text.

The latest reading assignment was on assessing your own writing. The first thing I could relate to was when the author said some of a writers best work comes when they are not worrying about the writing being right or wrong. I related this to when we type on this blog or on an instant messenger. One thing the author said I did not personally agree with. She said some of her student's best work comes at the end of their papers. For me, this tends to be the worst part of my papers. I liked how the passage talked said if the audience does not know much about your subject or may not agree you may need to provide more evidence. If they already know about the topic or are likely to agree then you can provide less evidence. This is good advice when trying to decide how much evidence to find.

The next section was on getting response and revising. The first couple of sentences in this section jumped out to me because I can directly relate to them. They talked about when you play guitar or basketball practice makes perfect. I do both of these activities so it got my attention. It went on to talk about how writing is the same way. If you need to re-write then do it. One part of this section talked about revising to sharpen your focus. It says to make sure every paragraph backs up your thesis. This part confused me and I'm not sure if my narrative paper is correct now.

Drafting Stajkowski

After reading the section on drafting I was enlightened on new ways to "get going" on a writing project. This has always proved to be a problem for me. I normally get all ready to get my homework or project done, sit down with a good attitude and stare blankly at the page. To be honest I wrote my narrative rough draft before reading this section which proved to be a mistake because after reading it I found ways that would of helped me greatly. The first part of the drafting section talks about setting a schedule. I waited till the last day to write my rough draft and I felt rushed so it was hard to write well. The section about dealing with writers block was also helpful. After getting up and taking a walk and doing something else your mind clears and you can think better when you return to your work. The next reading piece was on describing. The main point from this section that I learned was objectivity and subjectivity. I had never heard of either of these before. It seems to me that objectivity is more of just getting the point out where subjectivity has more emotion. The next section was about narrating. The first thing I learned from this section was that I have been using time markers in some of my writings and didn't even know what a time marker was. I had also never really thought about using a narrative for the beginning of another writing assignment entirely. The final section was about revising a peers paper. This section gave me all kinds of ways to look at a peer's paper while editing that I never thought about. After reading this I will hopefully be more effective and helpful while editing a paper.

Narratives and Generating Ideas - Joe Stajkowski

Our latest assignment was to read a few examples of literacy narratives. At the end of each example there were questions about the reading. I found these questions helped me understand what I had just read, and made me think about the reading in ways I normally would not after reading something. All of the examples were good but one stood out from the rest. The narrative by Malcom X was very powerful. His hunger for reading and learning was incredible. It really makes me feel blessed for receiving the education I do everyday at such a small price compared to what this man went through. He talks about getting on the floor in prison after "lights out" to catch a small glow of light to continue to read. I believe this desire and determination is what made him the intelligent man he was.

We also were to read a section on generating ideas and text. This was a main point of emphases of my 12th grade english teacher so I knew some of the methods already. Although I knew some I still learned new ways to generate ideas. The one that stood out the most to me was looping. It seems to me that this would help you think about what your trying to say and make sure you get everything out that you want. It seems as though it would help you remember things easier after multiple loops. I will most likely try this method in my next writing assignment.

My name is Joe