Essay 1

I found that the first essay was kinda hard to write. I'm not sure if it's because it was the first essay I had to write for English class in over 2 years or what but I just couldn't find a way to achieve what I wanted to. I'd like to blame my reading. It was one James Wood's "Victory Speech" which was basically a summary on President-Elect Barack Obama. It felt like I was doing a summary on a summary...it kinda felt like one of those twilight zone episodes when you see a tv in a tv in a tv... a never ending sequence of space and time.

ANYWAY, since I didn't see how any other summary would be easier to write, I went along with this strange case.

When I got my essay back I realized that I did cite the author too much. I think that was the hardest part about writing the essay - finding the balance. Which, by the way, I haven't been able to find. I don't know how to write a summary with less of the author's input. It makes my head hurt to try to figure out how to write about what someone wrote without citing them for everything. I have a lack of words to explain what they mean without using exactly what they wrote all the time. It would be easier if I could just put a hyperlink to the actual essay.

I guess that would defeat the purpose of summarizing. Either way, summarizing seemed like an easy task at first but it was a lot harder than I was anticipating.

Another thing that was hard to do was to think about what to summarize. What the main concepts of the reading was to summarize. It was hard to write about what seemed important when it very well could not be significant at all and how much of it needed to go into detail. When I'm rewriting it, I will definitely have to reread the piece and  think about what still sticks out and hopefully that will make more of a difference. I'll try harder to step out of my skin to see if I would understand what was going on if i was the person reading my summary.