After a relaxing fall break, the week of October 23rd was the start of a new unit. We had time to relax and now it is time to work once again!
We were welcomed back to a new interpretation of writing. This time instead of researching for the natural sciences, or composing for the social sciences, we are now analyzing the humanities. In this unit we discuss the patterns and connections in the humanities to understand a deeper meaning behind author’s choices of words and formatting. To do this, we learned about close reading. Close reading is when a reader reads to look for meaning behind the words as well as analyzing them and connecting them to the text. The overall goal of this is to understand why the author made these choices because there is reason behind everything.
In the next class we reviewed this utilizing examples such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When we did a group close read on the story and title, I found it interesting how the original author could have utilized the dwarfs to represent the seven deadly sins and keep that topic in a book for children.
The first assignment for this unit was the Feeder 3.1 Rough Draft that we had to submit based on the short story of our choice. This rough draft was our first attempt to do a close read of our short stories on our own. While doing this assignment, I felt as if I grew as a scholar being able to notice increasingly specific details the second time I read my story. I also began curious of newer meanings the more we discussed in our Feeder 3.1 workshop. Through this editing process with our classmates, we were able to gain a new eye to our interpretations of our stories. My partner and I chose the same short story and during the workshop we learned that we had two astonishingly different interpretations of the texts.
Since we have shifted focus to the humanities for this unit, we learned how to properly cite for this specific field. Compared to the previous units where the author’s first initials were used in the citation, humanities value the author’s full name since it plays a magnificent role in the story. In the natural sciences, everything is based on experiments and facts, so the author of the work is not as important as the actual lab and results conducted and attained. However, in the humanities the author is a bigger focus, and the clarity of the author takes priority. Authors have more freedom to write what they choose to create so credit is more important.
Learning that MLA utilizes the author’s full name rather than just their last name and first initial, I found it interesting that the focuses in each type of writing can be reflected in the citations.
In conclusion, after a nice relaxing break we got to be introduced to our new unit which focuses on the humanities. In this unit so far, we learned how to close read a text and took our first dip into this concept by closer reading our short stories for our Feeder 3.1 Rough Drafts. Along with learning close reading, we also learned how to cite properly in MLA 9th edition which utilizes the author’s full name. We also workshopped our Feeder 3.1 Rough Drafts which expanded our views on our close read interpretations of our selected short stories.
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