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Cole Mozelesky

Experiences in Literature
Professor Lago
May 3, 2014
My Reflection Paper
During the course of this year I have learned a great deal about writing that I had have
never known and how the way I write gets translated to other people. The way you write really
can affect the reader in a positive or negative way. If you have a slow, uneventful, and just not an
eye catching start to your paper, the reader is not going to want to read the rest of the paper. I
have this habit of "playing scales" in the beginnings of my paper as you have told me once
before. In music this is actually a good thing to do before you play, but from a writing
perspective I understood exactly what that meant and I saw myself writing those slow drawn out
beginnings. Knowing this I fixed my two essays and made them sound more interesting right
from the start instead of building it up from the start.
This semester I was asked to write several papers with prompts that were very thought
provoking and very different from any other essay I have had to really right. It was really out of
my comfort zone but I know I really learned from it. I really enjoyed writing the last essay I have
to write about Raymond Carver and his short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love". I think this was one of my best research papers I have ever written. I really enjoyed the
combination of analyzing the text and bringing that to show how his own personal life reflected
in his work.
This is an excerpt of that essay where I am analyzing the story. "These alcoholic
troubles would make their way through into the stories that Carver would write. Carver is known
for openly talking about his drinking problems in his stories through his characters in his stories
(Delaney 2). This helped him write many stories including "What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love". Three lines into the story he brings up drinking by stating The four of us
were sitting around the kitchen table drinking gin" (Carver 330). This sets up the plot for the rest
of the story which is centered on the group talking about love while each of them becomes more
and more drunk with the alcohol that is continuously brought up. Carvers personality is shown
through the main character Mel who is Terris husband. As the story goes on it seems he is
getting more and more drunk, skipping around from story to story unable to hold a normal
conversation. He shows signs of being an alcoholic because the story keeps references him
pouring more gin and holding the bottle, and the group even confronts him being drunk when
they say "Are you getting drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?" (Carver 334). This is followed by
him being defensive about him not being drunk and saying he is just talking his mind. He even
becomes demanding and tells the group to "finish this fucking gin" and on the next page it says
"Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table. "Gin's gone", Mel said" (Carver 337-
338). Whenever gin is brought up Mel is always the one to bring it up and he also seems the
most drunk and obnoxious, way more than the other characters in the story. This also slowly
brings up his violent side, something that Carver also has in common in his life with this
character." In this paragraph I think I was really strong on understanding and relating what
Carver was trying to get through in his work. This in one of my strengths that I bring to my
writing.
Another essay that I had much trouble writing was the first essay was wrote this semester.
In this essay it was shown in my final draft that I was having trouble making the beginning sound
more interesting like I was saying in the beginning of this paper. For my portfolio I changed this
problem and I am now very proud of this opening paragraph. The paragraph is now written like
so, "Reading in the world of today there are many temptations to look up the meaning of a story
just to get through it faster and move on, but this is not the smartest choice that could have been
made. By looking up the meaning of a work the reader is just really looking up someone else's
take on what it meant to them. This can make reading go by faster, though it really does take
away a lot of creative thinking that can occur while reading the actual text. There is no need to
look up the meaning of any text on the internet unless it is to research to see any allusions the
writer used in the text. Through some of the works we have read and discussed in class like "My
Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke and "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood, I have found it
detrimental to students learning and reading abilities to look up the meanings of literary works
online like most of today's students do. Using the internet is hindering students from exercising
their creative minds by letting someone else who posts what they think on the internet do it for
them."
In this paragraph I learned to write by just getting to the point and stop my habit of doing
the opposite which is one of my big weaknesses. I would have not written an intro paragraph like
this at the beginning of the year so this makes me very proud. I know I still need improvement on
how I word my sentences sometimes and to stop being repetitive in my essays, but I see myself
slowly getting better at fixing these, especially when I looked back at the beginning of the
semester. I know my writing can only get better and better and this class really helped on making
that come true.

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