Brooks Antweil

Victorian Literature

Learning Record A.2.

As I small child, I loved to read.  I think that this was sparked by my mother and older sister’s enthusiasm about reading.  Once I hit adolescence, I completely abandoned reading for more hands-on activities as many young boys do.  Upon reaching the end of my high school career, it was a shock to many that I decided to become an English major.  Again, this was somewhat prompted by my sister, who was pursuing a degree in English at Rice, and my mother, who got B.A. in English at Rice as well.  I knew for certain that I did not want to major in finance like my father.  I also took up reading again as a hobby.

Reading for class and reading recreationally are, unsurprisingly, very different experiences for me.  I am a slow reader because I can envision a story better if I hear myself saying every word in my head.  I also have great difficulty reading two books at once, so I find that I don’t read recreationally during the semester.  I tend to cram as many books as I can into school breaks.

I have developed very much as a reader since the beginning of college.  I admit that in my E 314L class, I only read two of the six assigned books because I had trouble balancing my social life and my school life.  Since that class however, I have yet to miss a single bit of reading required for an English class.  Since I became more willing to read assigned works, I find that I have proportionally become a much better critical reader; I can spot themes and ideas much more easily, and I can express what I find more clearly.  While I am growing as a reader, I find that I can enjoy reading even more than I expected.  Works that I would have likely been disinterested in at the beginning of college have suddenly become works that I have trouble putting down.  As I find my place as a reader, I am discovering my thirst for knowledge.  Lately, I have been taking pride in the fact that I can easily allude to literature and I feel smarter because of this.  I think that this course can be valuable to me if I can continue on the path that I have begun to forge as a reader.  If I can continue to read critically and if my thirst for knowledge and experience through literature continues, this course will be invaluable to be.

As a writer, I feel there is much room for improvement.  While I think that my vocabulary and ability to express myself has significantly changed since high school, I think that my organization in formal writing leaves much to be desired.  I find that as I mature as a person, I also mature as a writer.  I think that the best part of writing a paper is editing it and trying to tweak my expression so that others will see my point exactly as I see it.

I think that I can and will improve as a writer, and I have only recently been able to admit to myself that I need improvement, and have therefore been able to ask for help.  I think that if I started my writing assignments earlier, my writing would improve greatly because I would have more time to organize my ideas and I would be able to take breaks to let my feelings about a subject have more time to churn.  Recently, in class, you mentioned a hypothesis by the philosopher Hippocrates that was something like “you never step in the same stream twice—the stream has changed and you have changed since the first time you stepped in it.”  I think that Hippocrates’ philosophy relates directly to writing.  In other words, if I allow myself time to change after writing something, I give my writing a better chance to be expressive and clear.