Sierra Dellenbaugh Blog 9: What to write, what to write...
Sierra Dellenbaugh
Benedetti
English 11 AP
(What to write, what to write…) - 1/19 [12:40]
For the life of me, I could not figure out what to write on this topic. To be completely honest, I don’t really see the point of having topics for these posts when the whole point of them in the first place is to give everyone creative freedom. I was really happy with my first set in Language and Identity; I felt like I was able to express my true essence through my writing in the way I wanted to, and the words seemed to flow out onto the screen with ease. Language and America restricted that a little, but nonetheless I still felt like I put my thoughts out there and I generally liked what I wrote. However, this new topic has me extremely stuck. I couldn’t think of any way to discuss power without involving politics, and that can go south real quick. I found myself trying to write about how to take power out of politics, but it started sounding like another dull essay; I was even trying to find evidence to support it (what has APENG done to me?). This assignment was supposed to be a stress-free way to practice writing in my own, creative style, writing about what feels right to me in the moment, and it was for a while, but I guess just not today. I will try to remain as hopeful as possible to see if I can come up with a good idea in the future, but for now, I’ll just post this rant and hopefully I don’t lose too many points.
Ok I’m writing my comment for your blog post right after I wrote one for Sean’s post where I discussed the same thing. I agree, the topic that we are given is too restrictive in the context of APENG where every point in the writing section can mean an entire letter grade. In the past I often found myself haphazardly constructing a sentence to connect my subject of choice to language and whatever the second topic was. But I would say, I would’ve killed to get an opportunity to display my writing in front of my classmates and receive feedback. And I would add that we should be given a topic of some sort to provide a medium of inspiration. So rather than “language and power,” the quarterly topic should have just been left at “power.”
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteI too found it difficult to find a topic relating to power. It makes me come to the realization that if so many of us are stuck on this topic, there must be a clear reason. The reason might be that power is so prevalent in our world today, that it is hard to distinguish a clear topic to pull out of the fog and make analyses about. According to Lord Acton, the 19th century British historian, "power tends to corrupt," and "absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Hi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteIt was also pretty tough for me to come up with an idea of what to write for this week's blog post; I think that this is one of the of the reasons why the American High School APEng teachers came up with this prompt in the first place.
On the APEng exam, it is more likely than not that we will be given a prompt which we have little experience with or are simply just unmotivated to write about. Pushing ourselves on a weekly basis to expand on a limited seed trains us to produce great writing from even the hardest of scenarios, and it is one of the best trainings we can have for the APEng exam.
I hope that over the course of the quarter, you will find inspiration for your blog posts!
Hi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteWow. I did not expect another blog to bear such similarity to mine, but I guess I thought wrong. In my case, I gave up on trying to find a blog topic after 3 days of deliberation. Sometimes, the answer isn't in the destination; it's in the journey itself. I took that adage literally and wrote about my journey and what I learned along my quest to find a suitable blog topic. I hope that gives you some sort of inspiration for your future 3 blogs, good luck with that!
Sincerely,
Sean Wang
Hi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteSince power is so interlinked with politics, I think that it is a good idea to write about power without trying to separate out the politics. The topics do not really impose hard limits upon the actual essay other than a slight relation to the topic which can be logically followed. I find that finding something to write about for the blog is assisted by looking at recent news and trying to find something noteworthy. There are uncountable numbers of events happening throughout the world every day, so doing so is not particularly hard. If you find something that connects to the topic, then it is a writing point!
Sincerely,
Raymond Yu
Hey Sierra,
ReplyDeleteI felt the same way at first about the new topic of "power." After all, "power" is such a vague term. What kind of power are we supposed to talk about? Power over others, power over ourselves, there's simply too much to try and encapsulate about the entirety of power in a 250 word post. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the vagueness of our topic is something I could play to. At the end of the day, I can simply recap the recent events of my life and somehow loosely tie language and power, toss it into thesaurus.com, and call it a day. In all seriousness, I think the wide interpretation of our topic this quarter will hopefully lead to some interesting discussions.
Hi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteI really did not know what to write about last week. I couldn't find anything about language and power other than stuff about the power of language. Even worse power is a really vague word, so there is way too many things to talk about. Hopefully I find something for next week.
DeleteSincerely,
Vivan Waghela
Hi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteI also found this topic a bit hard to write about. Even though each prompt given to us is very loose, I feel like it's hard to come up with a solid thing to write about. I think its pretty interesting how you wrote about not knowing what to write about. When I first saw the title of your blog for this week, I thought it may have been a placeholder title. I agree that APENG has changed our writing to be a bit more structured. When I'm at a loss for what to write about for these blogs, I do some research on a random topic that barely fits the prompt and write an informal essay. Hopefully you get new ideas about what to write from reading other people's posts.
Hey Sierra,
ReplyDeleteI personally have found this topic super easy to write on, but I am noticing that it was a struggle for a majority of my peers. It might just be because power is a construct I have spent hours pondering on my own. Ideologies like these have always fascinated me and are something I consider on my own a lot. I think this makes the writing process easier for me. I do agree that APENG has played a huge factor in this as well. All of our timed writes have conditioned me to see writing as less of an ordeal and something somewhat enjoyable, which is really cool.