At the close of this my first semester at BYU I certainly have a lot to reflect on. My whole life I have really enjoyed reading and looking at things in new ways so when it came down to picking my major English simply seemed like the best choice. I will admit that coming to college after taking a break from education for a couple of years was the scariest thing I have done in my life thus far. I did however learn a lot about who I am as a writer and how to more effectively express the ideas and thoughts I have about things.

There are a few things that really influenced me throughout the course of this semester in English 251 the first being a look at how to create a "killer thesis statement." I found the exercises that we did here on how to craft a thesis statement were very helpful to me. In particular the index card assignment really helped me to find a new way to organize my thoughts and really narrow down a topic on which to write about. I will admit I was highly skeptical at first but it really did help to simply put out all the thoughts I had about a specific piece of literature and look at them in a different way.

I also learned a lot about poetry this semester and the different ways to look at it and analyze it effectively. I like many was not really the biggest fan of poetry and I have always found it pretty hard to understand. I never really felt like I got much out of poems and so when I was required to write an analysis on one I was not super excited to say the least. It was difficult at first but there were some things that I learned that really helped me out when looking at poetry. For instance the blog post about closely reading a poem really helped. It was nice to look at a poem and underline things, and point out major points of rhetoric just like I have done with other works of literature before. It really helped to clear away any stigmas I had about poems and simply see it as another form of literature that has a significant amount of meaning.

Overall this was a very eyeopening semester for me. I learned to look at poetry in a whole new way and I learned many new ways to look at and analyze literature as a whole. It was really great to see that trying new things and doing things differently is very beneficial and fruitful.