Analyzing My Analyzation

Shelby is slightly an overachiever, or she likes to think she is.  She like to think that she’s good at her major and all the stuff associated with it, like reading and writing and analyzation.  She sometimes just thinks she’s the cats pajamas, but then she does stupid stuff like writing a whole blog post for her 295 class and then realizing at the end that the whole thing should have been written in third person.  Things like that help her understand that her analyzation skills are probably not where they should be.

Shelby didn’t always enjoy doing reading assignments.  In high school, whenever a test began by saying “Read and analyze the following passage,” her heart sank right down into her stomach.  Analyze.  Assess.  Criticize.  Evaluate.  Gross.

  Now all of a sudden it’s her major and for some reason she thinks she’ll be able to get rich by doing it for the rest of her life.  Lucky for her, BYU professors have taught her a few tricks that take a bit of the dread out of analyzation by turning it into more of a brain teaser and less of a chore.

For the most part, she’s not too bad at looking at a text and figuring out what the author is trying to say.  She’s good at picking up the hints that authors love to drop through their word choice and figurative language.  Once she learned more about those, it was a lot easier to understand.

Through her classes, she’s come to learn more about the settings in which works were written, which helps out too!  Like, once she knew more about the class system and what life was like back in the England of Chaucer’s day, it made The Canterbury Tales a little bit easier to handle.  Still not that easy though.

There are definitely things that she needs to improve on though (along with reading directions.) They are as follows:

• ·     Getting more familiar with all the different categories of writing.  She rides the struggle bus when it comes to differentiating between all of the different categories that are out there.  Not so much with the difference between poetry and prose, but between stuff like a Gothic and drama, or remembering all the discrepancies between an English and an Italian sonnet…that could use some help.
• ·       Intertextualization.  As cool as that word is, she cannot seem to remember another work that she’s read in her whole life when she’s in the middle of an analysis.  Similar themes are wonderfully common across literature, especially among works written around the same time period, but she really needs to be able to recognize them in a crunch in order for her work to have more stability.
• ·       Formal analysis.  This kills her.  In her last class, British Literature I, she had to do a formal analysis of ten lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Writing that paper was like trying to jump on a pogo stick through quicksand for her!  She really has difficulty with the mechanical analysis of verbs, what they modify, why they’re in the specific tense, etc.  Diagramming sentences is so complex!

Hopefully over the course of the next semester, her weaknesses become her fortes and she can feel confident looking at a piece of literature.  Shelby would love to be able to pick something up and feel like an expert on the work just be giving it a read through.  That only comes through a lot of hard work and practice, but life as an English major gives more than enough opportunity, to be sure!