My Analytical Strengths

For the second semester, the College English 1B online class consisted of reading response journals, discussion boards, analytical essays, and group presentations. Ms. Davis assured us that this class included numerous reads and was expecting analytical essays written with brevity and clarity. As this course progressed, I discovered insights about myself as a reader and my analytical strengths and weaknesses. During this discovery, old and new habits arose in the reading process. Ultimately, the goal of this course was to improve my reading and analytical skills.
During the online learning process, I discovered a few new things about myself as a reader. Taking into consideration that I am quite fond of reading, the various pieces that were assigned were not as stressful as they were described to be. However, I found a handful of the pieces difficult to grasp and required close reading, and frequently, revising over multiple times. This mostly occurred during what I consider one of the most difficult sections of the course, analyzing poetry. The various poetic forms required different approaches when analyzing them. One of the most crucial aspects when analyzing poetry was detecting the significance of the meter in relationship with the tone and portrayal of
I believe one of my analytical strengths is recognizing and acknowledging background context and cultural influences. Another strength I obtain is the ability to detect the author's tone and connecting it to the theme. Unfortunately, my weaknesses shine through during analytical reading. At times, I disregard literal meanings and jump to complex assumptions. During the writing process, although I have improved greatly in comparison to the beginning of the year, my analysis can become confusing or disorganized. This results from the complex assumptions I make, rather than focusing on the significance of literal