Putting Knowledge to Use

English 251 was the first class that I’ve taken as an English major.  The jump from being a Music major to English was pretty drastic, and I entered this class unsure of what to expect.  I admit without hesitation that I was a novice to the world of literature and more than a little apprehensive when I imagined spending my semester reading long texts and painstakingly analyzing every nuance and hidden meaning that could possibly be included.

My expectations were wrong, luckily.  This class provided a hands-on experience to literature that made quite a difference for me.  First off, the fact that we used a blog to turn in assignments was incredibly beneficial.   I’m someone who has always been outgoing, but putting my writing out for others to see has definitely been a struggle.  The constant feedback and advice from my peers was helpful and made me look outside of my own views and analyze the work I had done for flaws that I’d probably overlooked.  I also really enjoyed getting to read the work of my classmates.  I gained insights into their personalities, recognize their writing, and was able to learn more about them than I would for any other class. 

Here, the classic works that we analyzed were also brought to life.  Instead of just reading poetry, we listened to it.  Instead of analyzing the words of a play on a page, we watched videos of them.  We were able to see what a difference it makes when personalities are incorporated into the work and audiences are considered.  To me, this really made all the difference.

Over the semester, I was able to figure out a lot not only about literature, but about what I wanted to do with my own future.  I went into this major not really sure of what I wanted to do with it, but after completing the various assignments, especially our last project, I found my aim.  This course was extremely practical and helped me look into more about writing, self-publishing, and techniques to market books to be read.  I learned the value of editing, and especially of honest feedback.  This class helped me to not only better analyze classic literature, but prepare for my own future work to be analyzed and improved as well.

Once, during a slide presentation, Dr. Burton talked about sending out feelers for projects before actually doing any work on them to see what the prospective audiences would be like.   At this time, I was working on creating videos for a website that I was creating.  I knew that the concept was good, but I had no idea how to create the videos or how to help them be successfully viewed.  After this lecture and talking to Dr. Burton, I got a group of my peers together and sent out one of the first videos to them for some feedback.  It was brutal.  But you know what?  It was SO GREAT because from their opinions, I was able to re-focus the project and make it into something much more productive. 

In this class, I did not spend months reading thousands of books and I did not break my cranium worrying about author intent.  I did not read everything that Shakespeare ever wrote, nor did I become a professional lit critic.  However, this class taught me the practicalities for literature in today’s society and how to be not only a knowledgeable consumer, but also an effective contributor, which is the most important thing of all!