Progress Blog

So, I am supposed to reflect on my goals and decide whether or not I have made any progress toward them. Just as a reminder, my three goals were to 1) learn how to spell “success” and “necessary” correctly, 2) learn the difference between passive and active voice, and 3) cut out all of the unimportant words, mainly from my creative writing.

For my first goal, I have paid attention to the way I am spelling these words. I no longer let my spell check automatically fix it. Instead, it goes a little like this—I type it out (usually wrong), see the red squiggly line underneath and fiddle around with the letters until it comes out right. It’s getting pretty tedious, but at least I can start to see what the words look like when they are spelled right. I recently made up a rule—I know, I really am a dork—to help me remember how to spell them. Here it is: “To succeed you need two c’s and two s’s, but if success isn’t your main goal, then only one c is necessary.” Yeah, ridiculous, but I think it’s helping.

As far as writing in passive voice, I really haven’t had the opportunity to see whether I’m getting any better or not. The blogs for this class are the most writing I’ve done all semester. I’m used to writing papers all the time for the English classes I take, but all I have classes I have now, besides my poetry class, are teacher prep and they are focused more on projects and lesson plans. Any other semester I’d be able to tell you right away how I was feeling about this goal. This time, though, I just haven’t been writing enough to see it.

My last goal, to stop using words that are meaningless, is one I am sure I haven’t made any progress with yet. The example I gave in my “goals” blog was a comment from my poetry professor saying that I include too many words that “mean nothing.” I’ve turned in a new poem every week and I’ve only gotten one back without similar comments. For example, I recently wrote a poem about a woman looking into her closet, describing her things and the meaning each item held for her. I began each stanza with a short line like “hanging there” or “right there?” because I wanted it to sound like she was talking. However, the poem came back with this comment: “Ruchell, good. I’d suggest, except for the first line, that the first lines of each stanza are just mannerisms—ways you got into writing it. The language in each is flat, you don’t need ‘em.” My other poems were given pretty much the same remarks, one pointing me toward Sylvia Plath who makes every line “worth our attention” and another one to Elizabeth Bishop who uses little words but makes them count. To be honest, I thought my poem was pretty okay and I’m not sure if I want to change it. I guess it just comes down to whose opinion is more important, the writer’s or the reader’s?

The funny thing is that I’m learning stuff in the class that I hadn’t realized I didn’t know. For example, after seeing the student writing we’ve been looking at I finally understand what a comma splice is! I’m not sure if I’ve ever had any trouble with them in my own writing, but now that I’ve seen it, it has become a real thing and not just some grammar mumbo-jumbo like before. And more importantly, I am starting to get the difference between “effect” and “affect” now that we’ve talked about it in class. It has always been something I’ve never understood, and I don’t know why I didn’t think about it when I was trying to decide my goals, but it spaced my mind. Either way, I’m glad we cleared it up last Wednesday.

Have I made any progress on my goals? Not really, but that’s okay. I guess that since I know they are my trouble areas I can keep my eyes open for them. It’s more important that I am making progress on other things, like comma splices, that I didn’t understand and didn’t even know it!