Goals for improvement Blog #2

I don't know what it is. Maybe it is my lack of poetry understanding or maybe my lack of practice with literary terms but I just did not do well with the practice AP lit practice exam. My strengths are that I can understand sometimes the metaphor the poem is trying to achieve and get the idea of what the poem is about like a relationship or a tree. Sometimes the language is maybe too different or difficult for me to understand but when I slow it down and read it carefully I can get a feeling of the mood better.

Its a little harder to find parallels or what a word is actually meaning if I don't exactly know what the literary device the test is asking for is. I know I've learned them all but after a while some of them mix up so really it is just the need to review the literary devices. I plan to review the literary devices and practice them by taking my own practuce tests so that I can apply them better to my writing and overall for the AP exam. Also there were questions asking specifically on poem distinctions, whether it was Shakespearen or Petrarchan. This is something I have no knowledge on so I plan to gain more knowledge on poem types this month and when we talk aboiut them in class. I know keeping orgtanized notes on the tyopes will help me to be able to identify them better. Most specifically the distinction between these two types since they are a questions that could be on the AP test.

The AP book gives tips on the answers and explanations that are good to take not on. For example I plan to remember that the capitalization of nouns often indicates personification. If I had known this before I probably wouldn't have missed the question asking what the specifics lines are primarily developed by. In those lines there was vulgar Pride and Wisdom. Both nouns and both capitalized, meaning personification. The little tips given and reading the explanation of the answers really help out so I plan in the next two months to study the tips and explanations included in the book.

I felt a lot more comfortable with the essay passage especially after taking AP Comp but I would say poems was what I struggled the most on. I know I can't rely on the essay passage to pass the AP test so by the end of this trimester I hope to get a better score on not only the essay passage by practicing more with the certain questions asked for the poems. Specific questions that I will want to practice on are when they ask what a certain line refers to. This question confuses me quite a bit because it usually refers to something else in the passage and it takes even more time to have to read back to the line and the poem also to find what it refers to. I know that by the end of this tri I will have gained more confidence in my analysis of poems because it is something I am determined to work on so that I am ready for the next tri and most importantly the AP exam.