How I Met the Learning Outcomes for English 251

1. Know Basic Literary Terms and Methods

I feel like I have met this outcome. While learning drama, I did a post where I focused on terms used in Drama. When analyzing a show, A Second Birth, I looked into the terms such as props, scripts and a summary of the show to describe the performance.When doing nonfiction, I looked into the literary terms and methods that were used in the bible, especially things like foreshadowing. Over the term, I believe I have gotten to know the terms well enough for literary conversations.

2. Know Basic Literary Genres and Representative Texts

When I was learning about Nonfiction, I realized that there was a lot of forms of nonfiction that I read on a regular basis, including the scriptures, speeches and journals. For the social media and family  assignment, I created my own version of a nonfiction text, doing a literary criticism. For my final paper, I looked at the subgenre of feminist literature which could apply to many sets of genre, including fiction and nonfiction. I feel like I have learned a lot about genre and how to differentiate them, especially when it comes to nonfiction.

3. Write Literary Arguments

This one has been a major focus this semester. I believe I first started learning and doing this one when I summarized Death of a Salesman and when I looked at A Second Birth and how it was different from script to performance. These summaries have been beneficial in helping me learn how to form a literary argument. I also did this with The Importance of Being Earnest. The first time I feel I made a literary argument was when I took Katie Roiphe's "Do We Secretly Envy the Childfree?" and debated it from the other perspective of the ridicule people who decide to have a lot of children receive and how it is not right. My Social Media and the Family assignment was a version of a literary criticism, which took on a part of a literary argument. As I began to write my paper, I started writing a thesis about the influence of literature in our modern world and delve deeper in the thesis assignment where I had to rewrite my ideas five different ways. I soon said the difference between defending and empowering tones in feminist literature. This post was the beginning of my writing process. This finally ended with my preliminary draft and finally my last draft. This final assignment was able to help me go from summarizing texts to making my own arguments.

4. Engage Literature Creatively and Socially

I struggled with this one at the beginning of the term because I didn't know what Dr. Burton meant by "creative". After our meeting together, I realized I needed to bring my love of stories and movies together. In my social media and family assignment, I used my father as an example in the text. Though I never got the chance of mentioning it in a post, I began to use a website named flixster.com which was able to help me to get more in touch with movies I enjoy and putting both literature and movies together. In another class, we were reading James Joyce's Dubliners, which inspired me to want to make a movie of my favorite of the stories, Eveline, which I wrote about in this post. I also put myself out there by putting up a story I wrote as a sophomore. I feel like I enjoyed blogs more now when I was able to take things I enjoyed and apply it to my posts.

5. Use Emerging Communication Tools and Pedagogical Methods. 

I used Facebook a lot this term to receive help for my final assignment. In two posts, I mentioned conversations over my statuses. This one was my first one, where I just mentioned the idea on feminist movement on our modern society. The next one I posted was a personal conversation between my sister in law and I had about feminist literature. I used the library website to be able to find a literary reference to assist me in my paper. I still continue to use Goodreads, where Richard and I have had the chance to recommend books to one another, and it also helped me to have literary discussions with friends on Facebook.