I, JURY

Reading my peers' essays have helped me find a few things about my own writing.  First of all, an expanded vocabulary in some areas of my writing could prove useful when attempting to convey my thoughts in a more professional way to the AP test graders.  Second, my structure could use some work.  I have trouble transitioning from my thesis statement to my supporting evidence in the body paragraphs.  Lastly, I should avoid making generalizations.  Being specific will prove to be vital once again.

BRAVE NEW ROUGH DRAFT (THESIS)

Discuss the relationship between science, religion, and political power in the World State:

The World State is not only a united dystopia in Huxley's Brave New World, but it is also the world's present state of being where science, religion, and political power have all coalesced into one force.  This novel takes it's form as if Henry Ford were to somehow impact the world in such a way as to become the "savior" upon which his people's scientific approach, religious beliefs, and political structure are based.  The world is the products of his innovation; the world is a futuristic assembly line.


My goal was a 15-minute thesis.  My apologies for not completing the essay as I'm having trouble with my PC.

I AM HERE

Self evaluation is something I usually do in my own head, but I am here.  Since the very first grading period, I wasn't very good at using Open Source Learning.  I even fought against it.  Advancing in this area is the only real improvement that I've found within myself this year.  I guess I know a few more big words to throw into my arsenal, and I understand literary terms and their definitions a little more, but my greatest advancement has been in collaboration this far.

LITERARY TERMS 6

• Simile: an analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as, in contrast with a metaphor which figuratively makes the comparison by stating outright that one thing is another thing
• Soliloquy: a monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone
• Spiritual: an autobiography (usually Christian) that focuses on an individual's spiritual growth
• Speaker: the narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings
• Stereotype: a character who is so ordinary or unoriginal that the character seems like an oversimplified representation of a type, gender, class, religious group, or occupation
• Stream of Consciousness: writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax
• Structure: the relationship or organization of the component parts of a work of art or literature
• Style: the author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects
• Subordination: the act of placing in a lower rank or position
• Surrealism: in this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind
• Suspension of Disbelief:  temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story
• Symbol: a word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level
• Synaesthesia: it involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in what seems an impossible way
• Synechdoche: a rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part
• Syntax:  the standard word order and sentence structure of a language
• Theme: a central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work
• Thesis: a proposition stated or put forward for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or to be maintained against objections
• Tone: the means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood
• Tongue in Cheek: a figure of speech used to imply that a statement or other production is humorously or otherwise not seriously intended, and it should not be taken at face value
• Tragedy: a serious play in which the chief character, by some peculiarity of psychology, passes
  through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe
• Understatement: the opposite of exaggeration
• Vernacular: the everyday or common language of a geographic area or the native language of commoners in a country as opposed to a prestigious dead language maintained artificially in schools or in literary texts
• Voice:  the "voice" talking and narrating the story is not identical with the author
• Zeitgeist: the preferences, fashions, and trends that characterize the intangible essence of a specific historical period

THE NOSE

1. Barber
2. He finds a nose
3. She threatens to report him for slashing someone's nose off
4. He sets out to get rid of the nose
5. Happiness lasts only for a moment
6. "The Nose" is the antagonist of the story.  It is the main obstacle Ivan must overcome and get rid of after finding

LITERARY TERMS 5

• Parallelism: when the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length
• Parody: imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features
• Pathos: emotional appeal
• Pedantry: overemphasizing the details
• Personification: a trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions
• Plot: the structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction
• Poignant: keen or strong in mental appeal
• Point of View: the way a story gets told and who tells it
• Postmodernism: literary style where tendencies include: (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation--in some cases bordering on gimmickry, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, and (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness (often postmodernism mocks its own characteristic traits)
• Prose: any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry
• Protagonist: the main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention
• Pun: a play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning
• Purpose: the subject at hand and reason for which the author had written
• Realism: any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world
• Refrain: a line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work
• Requiem: any musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the dead
• Resolution: the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events
• Restatement: stating something again for effect
• Rhetoric: the art of persuasive argument through writing or speech--the art of eloquence and charismatic language
• Rhetorical Question: a question posed to create thinking within the audience and is not answered formally
• Rising Action: the action in a play before the climax
• Romanticism: rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment and relied on emotion and natural passions that provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living
• Satire: an attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards
• Scansion: the act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter
• Setting: the general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs

LAUNCH/DRAFT

• What am I passionate about?  What do I want to do?
• I'm passionate about music and building relationships.
• How can I use the tools from last semester (and the Internet in general)?
• Surfing the net for articles on subjects I'm passionate about usually distract me for hours and hours, but this won't get my homework done.
• What will I need to do in order to "feel the awesomeness with no regrets" by June?
• I'm not sure.  I usually end up regretting doing the things I'm passionate about, because I end up not studying for the next big test and flunking it.  It seems as if we aren't allowed to be creative until we're in our mid-life crisis, and by then, we'll have full-time jobs, a wife and kids, and little money for ourselves to express that creativity.  Maybe I'll write a book.
• What will impress/convince others (both in my life and in my field)?
• I know that I can impress others once I become an expert in the field I'm passionate about.  Usually experts are the ones who have the degrees from college.  Hello debt.
• How will I move beyond 'What If' and take this from idea --> reality?
• That's a good question.  'What if I stopped prioritizing my school work and started focusing on my passion?' could lead to that one kid who dropped out of high school, joined a band, and ended up on the streets... I don't want that to be me.
• Who will be the peers, public, and experts in my personal learning network?
• In regards to personal learning (or anything personal in particular), my greatest peer is myself.  The public are those closest to me.  The experts are those with enough authority to grant me a valid opinion.

LITERARY TERMS 4

• Interior Monologue: a type of stream of consciousness in which the author depicts the interior thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur inside that character's head
• Inversion: inverted order of words or events as a rhetorical scheme
• Juxtaposition: the arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development
• Lyric: any poem having the form and musical quality of a song
• Magical Realism: mixture of fantasy and surrealism that creates a truly dreamlike and bizarre effect in their prose
• Metaphor: a comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking
• Metonymy: using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea
• Modernism: literature in the 20th century after WW1
• Monologue:  a character speaking aloud to himself, or narrating an account to an audience with no other character on stage
• Mood: a prevailing emotional tone set by the author
• Motif: a conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature
• Myth: a traditional tale of deep cultural significance to a people in terms of etiology, eschatology, ritual practice, or models of appropriate and inappropriate behavior
• Narrative: a story where the character tell its own story
• Narrator: the person telling the story
• Naturalism: a literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention
• Novella: an extended fictional prose narrative that is longer than a short story, but not quite as long as a novel
• Omniscient Point Of View: point of view where the narrator knows the irony; all-knowing point of view
• Onomatopoeia: the use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect
• Oxymoron: using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level
• Pacing: going back and forth or stepping back in forth in the same direction
• Parable: a story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth
• Paradox: using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level