Newest, Most Important Skill

The most important skill that I've learned this year would have to be... TWIST. It is so simple but the concept of it isn't just memorization like most other things. One actually has to put it to use in order to imprint it in one's mind, and it just brings out the structure of the book/poem. TWIST has had the biggest impact in English because everything I had learned until this year had been easily understandable in some way, but TWIST actually made me use my head at first instead of grasping it in the first 20/30 seconds. My thought processes actually had me reading the assignment paper over and over until I finally could comprehend it to some extent, then when I actually understood the whole thing I started using it bit by bit subconsciously (I just recognized it recently). This is a very useful tool for my development in English and I hope there will be better tools just like this, except easier to understand at first.

Lobsters

Before we started poetry I have always thought that poetry had to rhyme, but when we read Lobsters it was the total opposite. I have always thought that poems were confusing but when I saw the structure of the poem Lobsters, there were some parts I couldn't understand at the first 2 or 3 glances. Like the part where he talks about a lobster being a "somnambulist and climbing over the shell of a dream of himself." That had me perplexed for a while until I looked up somnambulist and figured out that the meaning I thought it was, was wrong. That part talks about how the lobster is walking over his own kin as if he was sleepwalking.

This ideal that we don't what we are doing as if it is very surreal and dreamlike is kind of like everyday life. We are trapped in this dream void and we don't know what is going on outside of life. The world is just so unreal that we don't know what happened in one place, almost as if we are stuck in our own little world in the place that we live in. Just like the lobsters who are collected and brought to the shopping mart, they are placed in a tank, and trapped there, the world is like a dream, they don't understand any of this. The world in my perspective is like a dream, but that doesn't mean one should give up and not move on, instead they should move on and hope to conquer this dream, and live a better life.

5 Part Paragraph Critique

The skills to create a good 5 part paragraph with quotes for concrete details is that the quotes need to be embedded. But with the quotes the paragraph needs to flow right through and the reader must feel comfortable reading it smoothly. One consistently mentioned problem is that the author needs to fix the embedding, and that the topic sentence doesn't really set out to prove what the author talked about throughout the paragraph. Most people didn't have the right wording within their topic sentence, a couple words could have been changed to exemplify their point.

My paragraph wasn't very good, I would need to change my topic sentence to enhance my concrete details. Also the last concrete detail I listed wasn't part of the point, because I wrote in my topic sentence about the social hierarchy but the last concrete detail was only about one person. The rest of the concrete details actually could have been applied to more than one person, like a farming group, it can be applied to all the farmers but not one person. My word choice didn't really enhance that point, the choice in the last detail didn't help the commentary either, I just kept going on with how that one person was getting rejected. I could have changed that detail to a group of people.