Something Interesting

During our fishbowl discussion on the poem "Lobsters", many different views on the symbolic meaning were given. The idea that stood out to me the most was not that the lobsters and their lives were a parallel to a person's life, (because that was what I had gotten out of the poem), but that the lobster's careless, almost absent-minded movement could be compared to a human bumbling through life, completely unaware of their surroundings and the inevitability of their death.

I had what I thought was an insightful view of the first and last stanzas, but the second that talked about their "somnambulist"-like movements confused me for the most part. The comparison between crustaceans and sleep walkers seemed nothing short of random. But, once that connection was made, the whole poem seemed to make much more of a statement. Now, not only were people carelessly buying a killing living creatures whose existence was horribly similar to their own, but now people were going through life with a blissful ignorance to their own mortality. I suppose ignorance is bliss... but this whole poem just makes you feel like the most unenlightened species, doesn't it?

5 Part Paragraphs

Over the past few weeks of listening to both positive and negative comments about the class's first five part paragraphs, there are a few qualities I noticed about virtually all of them. Almost everyone had at least one problem with their quotes; they weren't embedded correctly (using the word "pg" or just having incorrect lead in), they were too long, or they weren't in chronological order. After awhile, it became almost inevitable while listening to critiques that someone would bring embedding up eventually. Another popular mistake was not having all the needed transitions. I slipped up in that area, along with quite a few other people. The quality of the papers diction seemed to decrease as the paragraph went on. In the beginning, most people had strong, unique word choice that slowly faded to 5th grade vocabulary during the end, or just having words repeated quite a bit, which gave off the impression of running out of things to say. Even most concluding sentences were considerably weaker than most topic sentences.

Considering this was my, along with everyone else, first five part paragraph, I wouldn't say I did too badly. It might take a little bit of time to perfect this kind of structure because it's pretty different than anything I wrote in middle and elementary school. Transitions will definitely be the hardest thing for me to get comfortable doing. Even in less structured paragraph formats, I've struggled with using transitions. I also need to work on embedding. For my lead in, I need less plot summary and more in-depth analysis about the quote and why I chose it. Hopefully, after seeing so many great examples of paragraphs and hearing where we all need to improve on not only from the teacher, but from our peers, that all of us will be writing almost flawless paragraphs.