Reflection + Leads

After writing for a bit I now see that I’m interested in how the narrator of “White Tigers” did not seem to me the heroic being one would expect from a fan fiction of the Fa Mu Lan tale (especially since in the Afterword Hong Kingston tells us how she always wished she could be a kickass warrior woman that would make her family proud), which makes me want to understand how Hong Kingston’s style affected my interpretation of her narrator. One way to consider this is that Hong Kingston’s stylistic choice to fill in the gaps of the Fa Mu Lan story (with elements like magic, romance, femininity, and family pressures played up) in fact makes the girl in “White Tigers” seem far less heroic than Fa Mu Lan.

Here is my writing from today - I circled leads:

Narrative Reflection

All in all, I am pleased with my grades from this past semester. All of the comments and suggestions that you (Mr. Garces Kiley) put in my narrative and noted on my essay were very clear-cut, so no questions come to mind. I'll let you know if I think of any.

For things to work on, you told me that I could break the traditional essay mold a bit (while still keeping troubles, questions, etc. around) in order to deepen my ideas. This will definitely take some time for experimentation, so I'm going to try to pace myself, leaving enough time to play around with the format of an essay until I find one that really fits. Overall, really spacing out my timing is something I need to work on. I need to unpack some vague words more when I write an essay and give stronger evidence (among other things), and to improve these I really have to make sure I leave time to improve them. I want to continue doing numerous text explorations for my future essays, because I found them an extremely helpful tool with the F451 essay.

For in class, I aim to continue participating frequently, and try more to build on the ideas other people bring up. I want to continue taking clear reading notes - keeping them more concise should help with that.