Thoughts:
I am not revising my paper just yet. I am waiting for feedback from my group. I find that their peer review of my paper helps me greatly because I have a close-to-honest opinion about my paper. Of course, I know that any classmate reading another classmates paper will give a more positive feedback rather than specific and/or critical one because they do not want to offend the other person and have to sit with them in the same classroom afterwards. Therefore, I cannot completely rely on their comments but I still refer to them greatly when revising my paper. At this point I will return to my computer and take a look at my paper with a cleared mind and treat the work as if it is not mine. From there, I can make revisions without any lingering thoughts that might blotch my essay.
Right at this moment, I am struggling with my thesis –of course. I am constantly worried that it does not make sense. This anxiety worsens as my essay progresses because I am afraid that I am not following my thesis and. Sometimes, when writing a paper, I make so many notes and come up with different ideas that don’t always connect to each other and don’t belong in one essay. These ideas may be great to write about in a separate paper, just not the one I may be writing at the moment. But sometimes I force the idea to fit and that distorts my paper and confuses the reader. Where I’m trying to get at is that I’m worried that I’m constantly going off on a tangent and that everything my essay consists of has nothing to do with my thesis and I have to rewrite my paper entirely.
Also, I’m worried that I am not using the text properly or that the paper isn’t flowing properly. At one moment I talk about the poem as a form and structure. But would that belong with an essay that analyzes the poem from a literary point of view, meaning the devices the poem it uses? And how about analyzing the poem and text itself? My question is: can I talk about context, devices, and form (for example, the shape of the poem) in one paper?
I’m excited that I actually understand the poem (or so I’d like to think). If I understand what I am reading, I feel that I can write a deeper and intellectual paper. I do feel that I picked the easy way out –I read “Queens, 1963.” But if I were to pick any of the other essays I would feel a whole lot insecure and doubtful about what I am writing. I took AP English Language and Literature in high school so I feel that I can say that I am more used to writing papers like the one that is currently assigned to us. I’d just like to know if I am doing a good job writing it.
So far, I can say that I feel a lot more comfortable and positive about this assignment than about our last paper. I would just like to see the grade on my last paper to see if my style and method is working.
