Journal 5

You are being introduced to a lot of new terminology this semester, and you will be tested on the terms in the midterm and final exams. How are you preparing right now for this? Do you have a vocabulary study sheet? When you think about what you’ve read or when you take notes on the reading, do you use the new concepts and ideas? Do these concepts make sense to you? Do you find them useful? Talk about your relation to these new concepts and terms (such as “centered consciousness” or “New Criticism”).

I have a lot of new words to learn this semester. A lot of them I was already introduced to in high school. Especially the ones that are used to evaluate a story like the plot, and setting and all those terms. However, the theories are fairly new to me. In my AP lit class we talked about theories and which ones would be good to use for certain stories, but we did not talk about using them in analysis or how to use them in an analysis. I don't really understand this concept so I'm not really sure how to go about incorporating a theory throughout a paper, but I'm sure I will learn. Anyhow, to study for the terms and such, I started by looking over them and identifying words that I already knew. Then I used those definitions I already knew and compared them to the definitions given to us in the book and what I had written down in my notes. That way, I am able to come up with an accurate definition that I am also able to understand and really grasp. For the words that I did not know, I obviously looked them up in the book and tried to see what I could relate them to. I did this mostly with the theories. I picked something that I had read before or written before and saw how they were relative to eachother. This helped a lot! Most of the concepts and theories I can understand I just need a little more help knowing when to use them and how. Like the self/other theory which is post-structuralism, I get confused because sometimes I don't see exactly how it works when I'm reading the text. If someone were to tell me how it is illustrated then I could somewhat understand it, but if you asked me to explain it I would be completely lost. As for the terms though, knowing an example of each is helpful and it really aids my actual understand what is meant by the term. As long as I keep going over the words and writing down what I know, to help me remember, I'm pretty sure I will be able to do very well on the mid-term.