Our first assignment for this blog is to detail our expectations for the year. Our overall goals, what we hope to learn and what we hope to develop. I can only imagine that the entire class will have mixed expectations, so it is highly likely that no one's expectations will be met, unless there is one particular recurring theme that everyone seems to want to learn. However, for the sake of getting my thoughts down on paper, I will be filling this out with the utmost importance and detail. With any luck I will have it done before 11:00 PM tonight, which is a Monday, so I will have that much less work to do tomorrow because, judging by the workload I had today, I will not have time to fill out this blog at any point tomorrow, unless we are given class time to work on it, which I highly doubt, because I know Randy is a busy person and probably has a lot of knowledge which he wishes to pass down to our small, childish brains. Now, I've wasted an entire paragraph talking about things that are simply flowing from my mind into my fingers which soar across the keys which type into the computer, so I should probably stop, put a period in, and hit the enter key twice to start a new paragraph.
Now, the first question. My overall goals for this year are, essentially, to become a better writer. I wish to be able to get my thoughts down on paper without ending up going completely off topic with what I was originally speaking of, and I also wish to be able to fine-tune my own writing because, quite often, people seem to have a hard time finding massive errors that are wrong with it (simply errors on clarification, in which I know exactly what I mean in my head...). As we were taught by Lori last year, it will also be a good skill when it is 3:00 AM and you are sitting in a library during college and you have a term paper due that day and you have no one to review it but yourself. I also like some of my work to be a surprise, and I am highly critical of myself, so I think I would be the best critic when it comes to reviewing my work. Naturally, I want to hone these skills, and also improve my skills as a creative writer, because creative writing is something I do quite often - I just find it hard to stick with a story once I've started it. I get lucky if I come up with something that lasts more than ten or twenty pages, you know!
Now, I touched base on what I hope to develop in the prior paragraph, so I'll just skip that part and go straight to what I hope to learn. I hope to learn how I can incorporate things around me into my work, and show people exactly what I'm thinking or what I'm imagining at the time that I am letting my mind flow through my fingers onto the keyboard or into my pencil and onto the paper and/or word document and/or web page and/or blog and/or chat box and/or... well, I think you get the idea. I would like to learn to be as descriptive as I can, so when I am writing a story about characters I have created and developed, the reader can see their world exactly as they see it, and live their lives the way they've lived them. I would also like to know the balance between being too descriptive and not being descriptive enough- I absolutely hate it when I am writing stories with another person, and their character only speaks a line of text, or simply looks away from my own, but I can imagine it would also be rather frustrating to scroll through a wall of text of exactly what the character is doing or thinking. Essentially, I would like to learn how to be a good writer, to capture my reader's attention and get them to stick with me the whole time that I am writing the story, or they are reading it, and I would also like to hone my ability to focus, because that seems to be an even bigger problem for me - focusing on things that I am writing. I often tend to get bored of one thing and start another, only to get bored of that, and it just ends up becoming a vicious cycle... and then the things I want to work on I struggle to find the motivation for. That's definitely something I'd like to try and fix over the coming year.
I also expect to be challenged, but not only in an academic way. It would be nice to learn things that I did not know before, yes, but I would also like to challenge myself to learn new skills; like how to talk to people without just kind of sitting there awkwardly and zoning out, or how to take things with an open mind and not automatically assuming what someone is going to say... or not finding a subject in my mind and just wanting to stick with it. Humanities is the study of history and language arts, but the title leads one to believe that it is also the study of human nature, which in a way could be true because were it not for human nature, history and language arts would not exist at all. Essentially, I'd like to be challenged academically, to improve my writing skills, and to improve my people skills. If I could get that out of this year, then I would certainly be satisfied with myself.
...Hmm, what do you know, that went by a lot faster than I thought it would. I am glad I got it over with now, though, so come tomorrow I don't have to worry about this when I'm doing the work I know I'm going to get...
-Nikita out
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