Ist Synthesis Essay

    I thought the first synthesis essay was a little hard. It was hard to start writing (but that paper you gave us on hooks helped) and hard to come up with what to say. It was about Christopher McCandless, if we thought he was ignorant or not. I disagreed with Shaun Callarman; I thought he was being too harsh and didn't think of the matter from Chris' point-of-view. Something that made it difficult was that we were given 8 sources. I didn't know where to start because there were too many resources to use.  I used three: Into the Wild, "Where I lived and What I Loved For" by Thoreau , "Nature" by Emerson and "Self-Reliance". I used the last two the most because they both had Transcendental ideas, which relates to Chris' way of thinking. It's weird because Emerson and Thoreau seem to think just like McCandless. Once you read these essays, you get a feel of why Chris did what he did. I thought the debate was fun! It started off a little quiet and dead because everyone's shy at first but then it got heated. Not to brag, but my team had some pretty awesome ideas :) Well anyway, I'm really glad we did that because it inspired me when writing my essay. It gave me a lot of great ideas.
      It took me a while to write this essay. I thought my intro was OK but it was hard to start the body. I didn't feel very comfortable with AXES. I used my Into the Wild book for some quotes (I flipped through every single page to read my annotations; they helped big time). I finally came up with three ideas and attempted to have AXES. I remembered to staple on the rubric and I turned it in early before the bell rang. While I was taking the Beloved quiz, I got it back. I got an 88 :) Not bad. Plus 10 extra credit points. Yay! I prefer Style-analysis over this. I'd rather analyze a document than write about my opinion on something. It's more fact-based and straight forward in my opinion. Well, I'll be reading Beloved over the break. I need to reread a lot of stuff because the questions were familiar to me and I remembered reading about them, but I just couldn't remember. Hopefully I'll do better on the second quiz after I study like crazy!     
Happy Thanksgiving Ms. Sobrero!