Language Arts...

This year in Language Arts, I grew in my understanding on how I can use imagery in my writing to show the reader what the world looks like through eyes. I have also grown in my ability to give my writing a deeper meaning by using metaphors and similes to make the reader think. The reason I think I grew most with my ability to use imagery in my writing and , is because since the beginning of the year I have learned how to show things in my writing through descriptive so that people see what I am writing about.

 

The unit that supported this growth was the memoir unit where we wrote about an event that happened in our lives. The purpose of the project was to write about an event that happened in our lives and use the new terms that we learned in language arts to help us make our writing more interesting. The first thing we did in this unit to make our short memoir was to write a really rough draft of the event that we selected. Then we learned all about different ways to write about things to make it more interesting and professional, then added it to the draft (For example making a sentence: I like to eat pie because of its delicious texture. Instead of: I like pie.). A few drafts later mainly doing story line edits and peer critiques we submitted a final that would be graded for the changes that were made. The products created throughout this project were several drafts of the writing, a few pier critique worksheets, a grammar book in a page worksheet and the final draft.

 

The first artifact that I have to demonstrate my growth is my personal memory memoir that we wrote at the beginning of the year so that we could get to know the class better and we could tell about one of our favorite moments. Whilst writing during this project, we learned about different writing styles and ways to get our message across. Throughout each revision of the memoir we would focus on a different part of the writing. For the first few revisions we edited the story line but once we got done with those edits we started focusing on the intro/closing, imagery and diction. For the intro and closing we learned how to hook the reader and keep them interested and for the closing we learned how to make the story complete (for example at the beginning of the letter we might say “I love myself” we would then repeat that phrase at the end to add emphasis and make the writing complete). Next we started editing for imagery, first we learned what imagery was (Use of text to describe something for example a sunset.) then we edited our work for it. The majority of the imagery edits I made had to do with my descriptions of things and just a lack of info. Finally we edited for diction which was the hardest to do but the easiest to understand. Diction is how we write correctly (using grammar, commas, complete sentences etc.) the main edits I had to make for my memoir was incomplete sentences and incorrect grammar.

 

The second project that I am going to use for to show my growth in this project is the Who I am poem. The purpose of this project was to make a poem that said something about ourselves and used the new terms we learned about. The process that we used to complete this project was to first make a paper full of lines that we would want in the poem, then we made a draft of the poem using some of the lines that we wrote down on the paper. Finally we started editing the paper using our newly acquired terms we learned through a PowerPoint. Then we did our final edits for diction and submitted the paper through pilot and the final poem was created.

 

My second artifact that I am going to use to show my growth is the Who I am poem mentioned above.  The growth that I experience throughout this project was how to make my poem more complex by using metaphors, similes and hyperboles. What these did for my poem was make it so that the reader thought more and took my work as I wanted them to. An example of a metaphor in my work is the line “, I am just a shadow creeping through the crowds.” this is comparing to unlike things as if they are in common. A simile that I used was in this line “I am growing like a weed” this is comparing two not similar things using like or as. And the final one I am covering here is hyperbole “I am a nothing” a hyperbole is an unrealistic exaggeration.