Sam Martinez |
Senior humanities
INDEPENDENT Poetry Study
The Strangest Creature-
Samuel H.
Are you familiar with the strangest creature?
Hurling through space and time,
bodies acting solely as vessels for their intentions.
Malicious and misleading-
Behaving in a blaring and gaudy fashion
The creatures silently despondent-
Appearing the innocent,
As inviting as the snake, the creatures speak with poisonous dictation,
Death disguised in a tantalizing invitation.
Habitual as the clock,
The creatures walk satanically through the garden.
In search of evil, their compassion stale and hardened-
The creatures brought the darkness, drowning the light,
The creatures--- that of the night.
Their tactics primitive---yet fatal all the same,
Burning it all to the ground, most perished in the heat of the flames.
Impossible to extinguish, their wicked fire needs no fuel to burn.
Arriving sinister and rather unholy, the creatures pillaged and plundered-
Taking everything they could carry-
Thieving freedom and life from those around them;
The creatures only perish by their own blade,
Wielded by their own atrocities.
The creatures know not what they are,
The creatures know only the eradicated.
Samuel H.
Are you familiar with the strangest creature?
Hurling through space and time,
bodies acting solely as vessels for their intentions.
Malicious and misleading-
Behaving in a blaring and gaudy fashion
The creatures silently despondent-
Appearing the innocent,
As inviting as the snake, the creatures speak with poisonous dictation,
Death disguised in a tantalizing invitation.
Habitual as the clock,
The creatures walk satanically through the garden.
In search of evil, their compassion stale and hardened-
The creatures brought the darkness, drowning the light,
The creatures--- that of the night.
Their tactics primitive---yet fatal all the same,
Burning it all to the ground, most perished in the heat of the flames.
Impossible to extinguish, their wicked fire needs no fuel to burn.
Arriving sinister and rather unholy, the creatures pillaged and plundered-
Taking everything they could carry-
Thieving freedom and life from those around them;
The creatures only perish by their own blade,
Wielded by their own atrocities.
The creatures know not what they are,
The creatures know only the eradicated.
October 13, 2015- Writing Reflection 1
Samuel H. Martinez
Three Writing Goals
Goal #1- Cohesion- Do all the pieces fit together?
For me, writing is a primary form of expression. Both fortunately and unfortunately, this love of writing leads me to write off on tangents. I just begin to let my thoughts flow and my fingers fly. Despite the fact that this, more or less, obnoxious habit has brought content to my writing that would not have made it without my tangents, I aim to hone in on that flaw in my writing. I want to be able to connect my content in a more sophisticated nature, a nature that is more apparent to the reader. For example, in my review of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, my thesis stated that the ‘Land of the free, home of the brave’ is nothing more than an unobtainable idea. I continued to quote Tocqueville and make connections with other writings, from other authors. But I never tied my ideas together to support my thesis. I have a tendency to lead the reader to my conclusion without ever really providing a conclusion for the reader. However, this issue has been prevalent; as it has appeared in other pieces of writing I have composed. Recently I heavily revised a piece I had written months ago. The piece is titled The Last Few Minutes and while it is nothing more than a presentation of my own thoughts, before the revision it was evident that I managed to ‘rant’ here and there. I chose this to be Goal #1 because I believe that if I can manage to master how the structure of my writing and how the different ideas play off of each other and support one another, then my writing ability will improve far more, had I simply chosen to focus on a more elementary area of writing (i.e. vocabulary, etc.)
Goal #2- Sentence Focus- Is the subject of each sentence clear to the reader, or must they pick the sentence apart and analyze in order to determine who it’s about?
Goal number 2 directly coincides with my first goal as it stems from the same habitual issue- my tangents. On occasion I find that compose sentences that are almost too complex for their own good. It can be difficult to determine between the subject and the predicate. Then I throw in some indirect objects, modify that predicate to be an action verb predicate, and all of the sudden one has to analyze the subject to determine who and what the sentence is talking about. A perfect example of an overly complex sentence comes in the second paragraph of Tocqueville review. I wrote, “While discussing the effects of equality on the public opinion during times of a monarchy as in comparison to a pure democracy, Tocqueville presents the idea that, ‘The same equality that renders him independent of each of his fellow citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater amber. The public, therefore, among a democratic people has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.’ (Pg3-10).” That is one hell of a long sentence… I am shooting for more clear and clean sentences but all while maintaining my vague style that leaves a great deal of the story up to the reader.
Goal #3- Topic Sentences as Transitions- Killin’ two birds with one stone.
My topic sentences are decent, my transitions are alright. But they both could be better. So for my third writing goal I want to learn how to turn a transition into a topic sentence while still keeping the fluidity of the writing intact. An evident occurrence of this flaw in my writing is evident in the transition between my introductory paragraph and the first body paragraph. I end the intro- talking about life and how so many people think they have it all figured but in reality nobody really does. I continue into my first body paragraph with, “When high school began my life changed a lot…” Now the content is not broken to a degree where the reader might struggle to understand what’s going on, it works; but it could be stronger, more fluid, basically written better overall. I think that improvement in this aspect of my writing, in addition to growth in my sentence clarity and overall cohesion between paragraphs that I could become a great writer.
My Writing Workshop Reviewed-
Instead of a college essay, I participated in a one-on-one writing workshop with Lori Fischer. I really enjoyed this opportunity as Lori provided me with very helpful feedback and insight that I had not received from another individual prior. The piece I wrote is titled The Last Few Minutes and is nothing more than a presentation of my thoughts in a creative fashion. When I brought the initial draft to Lori she told me she enjoyed it but that I needed to clean it up a little bit. Within my piece there were several incidents of repetitive language and among other a things, a more or less lack of connection between the beginning, middle, and the end. But Lori helped me identify what ideas I wanted to keep intact in my piece and what pieces of the story could be gotten rid of. Prior to feedback from Lori, the overall theme of this piece revolved around the idea of life and what defines one’s life. And while I enjoyed my ideas and content produced around that subject, I felt that it could be stronger and I simply wasn’t reaching my goals. So I decided to re-write a large portion of the story and work in a motif centered on life and death and how one ought to handle the whole situation from my point of view. Not only did she help me hone in on the content but also more technical factors such as my habit to accidentally change the tense of writing without meaning to, etc.