Reflection

                The quality of my writing has improved over the course of the trimester through not having less grammatical errors. In a couple of my previous posts I would have simple things that I wouldn’t do like underline the title of book. Like I did form my post about Playing For Knight. Or I would do things like not indent in a new paragraph and have run on sentences. Also in my posts I wouldn’t go into much depth on what was going on in my book. In the early post I gave a quick summary of what has happened in my book since my last post. But I made it about two sentences long and didn’t give it much detail. It made my posts seem really short and simplistic. I could’ve gone on in the summary and possibly given the reader a picture that was in my mind and talked about it. Also an aspect that I added to my more recent posts was I made connections. Like in my post about predictions, I compared my book to another piece of text (The Giver) in order to show a similar situation in another story and use it to help make my predictions. But the main thing that has improved in my writing is incorporating quotes from the text into my posts. In my early post I talked about who I would recommend my book to. Then in my post I said it could help motivate athletes. But I never said how. I could’ve given an example when it motivated me and said that considering I am an athlete myself. But then in my more recent post I found good quotes in the story to help show the writing style of the book, and then I went on, on what the quote means and I made a prediction on the quotes to help understand the text better.

I struggled with finding things to blog about sometimes. I struggled with this because I would post about all the things the teacher would grade me on and then I would do a summary and another summary and another. I felt I did the same thing a lot and that I needed to do something different but I couldn’t think of anything. I would stare at a blank screen for twenty minutes just thinking what I could blog about. Also I had a hard time finding a good book to read. A couple times I found a book and would drop it because I didn’t like it at all I would try to work through this struggle by finding a rhythm of blogging. I would try to give just one summary on each book, then talk about a character in each book then try to do a different graded piece on each book. It worked sometimes until I got to a point where I wouldn’t read much for a couple days and I wouldn’t have enough new writing to blog about. So sometimes I wouldn’t blog about my book I would blog about the short stories. One strength I had with blogging was making connections. I made a couple different connections that I felt were good. I made them to different types of things. Like other characters, another book, and videos. The one I liked to best was the one about the video I found. It was very similar to way I felt while reading plus it was an interesting video. I didn’t make my reading goal this trimester it was a bit of a stretch for me. I used goodreads.com to keep track of the books I read and was reading. But what I liked the most was it gave me book recommendations because I always have a hard time finding a book to read. I think I have improved as a reader this year. I think I can easily tell by seeing my posts and how I was able to understand writing better throughout the year. Also, as much as I hated “Romeo and Juliet” I think it really helped me. It made me analyze text more and have a better eye for finding things like figurative language and finding their meanings.