Simply Sincere Sentiments

          As I was scrambling to read my second SBC selection, a compilation of Emily Dickinson poems, I came across the poem below early on and it remained my favorite throughout the duration of my reading.           Immediately after I read it I fell in love with it because it’s so profound and poetic, but also because its story is so imaginable. Therefore it is no surprise it's my favorite because most of my own poems are narrative poems because I love narrative poetry. It combines poetry and storytelling - two of my favorite aspects of English.           The funniest thing that transpired though was that I read the poem to my thirteen-year-old sister. I asked her if she understood it and she replied "Not at all,” so I proceeded to thoroughly explain the story and why I consider it beautiful. I love the rhymes, but my favorite part is the last stanza. Dickinson’s use of alliteration with “sil...

     I've often had English teachers and parents of students I've tutored describe this scenario: "I want my students/kids to learn to read and enjoy reading, but they don't. They don't understand what they're reading and they get bored. The book loses their interest. They'll never learn to read if they keep abandoning books." Everyone's first solution to this problem - comic books. Without a second thought - comic books. Automatically - comic books. As if comic books are some divine savior for kids who don't like to read. I can tell you they certainly are!       Kids usually don't like reading at first because they're not good at it; they're still learning how to do it. Throw a comic book in their hands and an unexplainable miracle happens - they learn how to read! All of a sudden they start saying things like "a apple" and writing "your beautiful" and I can't imagine why. It certainly isn't because comi...

     As I was reading chapter twenty-six of Tom Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor , I realized that irony, the subject which he was describing and explaining, was literally in the short story I read previously - "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin. I was reading along fine, even after it was revealed Mrs. Mallard's husband died because I wasn't emotionally attached to his character yet, when I got a big shock that literally made me gasp out loud. Mrs. Mallard just got the news her husband died and finally discerned that that makes her feel "free?!" After the initial shock wore off however, I realized that notion isn't something unfamiliar to me. Many women, including ones that I know, feel or have felt oppressed by their husbands. It's unfortunate but true.      The point though is that I was initially shocked. As a society, we expect that when someone learns their significant other has just passed away, they will be devastated...

Throughout history, stories, no matter how they were told or in what form they were presented, have had complex characters. The most frequent commonality to appear amongst stories, regardless of genre or era, is the inclusion of the tragic hero as an elemental character. The similarities don’t end there though. As seen in the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka, the TV show Alias written by J.J. Abrams, and the excerpt from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being , it is also common for the tragic hero to specifically possess the tragic flaw of an uninhibited and vehement belief - though it is often disguised as something else.           All the works established above include examples of tragic heroes who seemingly possess one tragic flaw, but whose fervent beliefs end up being what truly lead to their unfortunate final circumstances. Each work’s tragic hero can be characterized by one overpowering and domi...

As many of you know, I am a huge word nerd. I also love definitions because words are useless if you don't know their meanings.  Defining "victim" and "fate" for the Oedipus debate got me thinking about how often I refer to or use definitions.        In my favorite TV show, Signed Sealed Delivered (SSD), the main character is also a word nerd. While watching it, I often Google the definitions for a lot of the words from his dialogue. From SSD alone, I learned the words ablutions, effervescence, abhor, and incommunicado. I also use definitions to support my stances when the SSD fans on Twitter are debating. For example, there is one scene where Oliver the word nerd and his love interest Shane are locked in a bank vault. Oliver is still married to his wife Holly even though she fled to Paris years before. The debate was on whether he was flirting with Shane in the bank vault despite being a married man. I immediately used the definition of flirting in my evide...