Today the final version of our culminating project paper was due. Looking back at my first draft of this paper, I feel like I've come pretty far. The first draft was able to explain my idea but the connections weren't really there. I definitely needed to add in better transition and clearer thoughts. In the second draft I focused more on grammar and flow of the paper. I think this was a direct effect of reading it out loud to my peers. Areas where i repeated Medea multiple times or had a typo stood out very clearly to me when I read out loud.
During the final revision, I came back to the connections. One of my last peer reviewers caught a crucial error in my writing. I had made a statement in the conclusion paragraph about the power of Medea's charmspeak confuses the protagonists, but I had never explicitly outlined this
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These past weeks I've written two drafts for my paper. The first one was definitely a little rough. There was so much going on last week that it was hard to really focus on writing. Luckily, we did some peer reviewing and I got some great feedback, so my second draft is much better.
Upon peer reviewing my second draft, I'm feeling pretty confident about my writing skills. Everyone so far has said it makes sense, and most of my comments are just grammar or spelling errors. I can't wait to finish this! Our first draft of our paper is due this week. I thought I had all of my research when I did the Voices in the Conversation assignment, but alas, I need more. I've spent hours and hours finding quotes from The Lost Hero and re-reading Euripides's Medea. The good news is, I feel very confident about the content of my paper now. I've got some really good quotes, and I know the texts so well at this point that I feel like I already have the paper written!
These past few days we've been creating elevator pitches and twitter posts about our project topics. At first I thought these posts were just busy work, but I found them to be really helpful. They were a fun way to start thinking about my thesis without knowing I was. The fact that you can only use 140 characters for twitter posts specifically helped me with the brevity of my thesis. Usually, I make them way too long and wordy.
Wow! Last night our assignment was to examine the voices in our conversation and come up with our working argument. At first I had a little trouble with the Google searches because it would keep coming up with different adaptations rather than a comparison. Eventually I figured out that using "a comparison of Medea adaptations" gave me much better results (I know, kinda a "no duh!" moment, but I was tired, okay). I was surprised to find a lot of masters and honors theses on this topic. I was even more surprised that they were so easy to understand. Although I initially thought this assignment would be really hard, I actually found it quite useful. Reading the different theses helped me narrow down and select my own project topic.
This evening I brainstormed ideas for my project artifact. So far I've come up with 6 ideas: drawing of character comparison, lucid chart/web, fortune teller, board game, a maze, or a marble machine. I really like the fortune teller and maze game ideas. Each one offers a different opportunity/perspective. With the fortune teller I could depict each Medea's autonomy, personality, and powers in each version by the number of flaps you raise. With the maze I could show that no matter how Medea's traits change, she still remains a successful character in literature (i.e. you can complete the maze). Either way, I'm really looking forward to creating my artifact.
After receiving feedback from my peers and Dr. Holt, I decided that I don't really like my topic. This evening I sat down with my sister and she helped me brainstorm some new topic. Below is my brainstorming process. I ended up choosing to with the comparison of Greek mythology to PJO (Percy Jackson and the Olympians). Click the button below to see my proposal.
Today in class Dr. Holt had us start brainstorming ideas for our culminating project. I want to focus on the psyche of a revenger and how that person fits in to society. I think it would be really cool to include stuff from The Prince, The Courtier, and Greenblatt. In addition, I want to see how revengers in modern day media work in their environment, whether that be a book, movie, or play.
I think this could be a really cool project and would give some insight into why audiences are so drawn to revenger characters. Today we finally got a to learn a little more about what senior project is. There are basically three components.
1) the academic part 2) life skills 3) experiential learning The academic part is what we are doing in English class. The life skills part starts the first week after we seniors get out of school (May 5th!). During this week we should learn basic skills like how to cook, fix your car, survive freshman year, etc. In the last week before graduation, we are asked to do our own thing. Start a project, explore Atlanta, make a video, etc. So far I'm somewhat looking forward to this experience. In class today we were asked to start brainstorming about things we want to do. For this the academic part I thought about delving deeper into the psyche of a revenger. I thought it would be interesting to look at the past and present mindset of revenger characters in not just texts, but modern books, movies, or TV shows. Below you can see some of my ideas. |
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May 2017
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