Commenting Review Week

I feel like the comments are really helpful. Even if you don't agree with what people are suggesting, it is nice to have the feedback from a variety of people. It is especially useful when they notice something that you may not have. I had a comment about how hard the text was to read on the color of background that I had. When I looked back at what they were looking at, I noticed that it was hard so I made sure that I did not continue to keep it that way.

I don't do any comments or receive any comments from my classmates in any other class. I receive feedback from teachers but it is nice to have it from students who are in the same position as I am. They may not have as much writing knowledge as the teachers so it is helpful to have peer feedback. Overall, I think that the comments are helping me to improve the way that I am writing

Personal Photo of my husband, my kids, and my cat on Halloween 2014. Just because my family is adorable and my cat's eyes look perfect for it being Halloween.

.

Writing Review Week

I have really enjoyed the writing assignments in this class. I enjoy the readings and I usually know fairly quickly which story I will be using for my storytelling posts. As I am reading, I try to come up with different scenarios to place in the story and see if it sounds like something that I think that I could write about.

I am especially excited about my storybook. At first I felt a little overwhelmed and I was over thinking it but once I picked my topic and my stories, I really began looking forward to writing it. I think that the comments from people on my storybook are really going to help me to make it really good. Even the comments on the storytelling posts help a lot. It is nice to get critiques from everyone.

One of my storytelling posts that I enjoyed the most was my retelling of the story of Bathsheba. As I was reading the original story, I kept wondering what would happen if Uriah had just opened the letter. So it was cool that I had the option of making it up for myself. Overall, I really enjoy all the writing. I like to be able to get creative in a class, especially when all my other classes are pretty strict in how things are done. It is nice to have a class where I just get to be creative.

Image from my storytelling of Bathsheba. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Reading Review Week

I really enjoy the reading assignments for the class. I have had to do some extra reading in order to get the information that I wanted for my storybook but the stories are so interesting that I do not mind having to read extra. I did find that the stories that had comments written in them were the easiest to read. I felt like they answered all the questions that I had while reading the stories. Some of the ones without comments sometimes left me with questions regarding background or a word that I was unfamiliar with. Overall, I feel like the UnTextbook is really useful.

With regards to my reading diaries, I found that they were very helpful. I just looked back through at my old ones and with what I had written, I could remember the stories. I found that it was easiest to base my storytelling blog posts off of the reading diary posts. This made it easier because I would reference the summary and comments that I had made, without having to re-read the entire stories.

One of my favorite stories had to be The Stonecutter. This story stuck out to me because of the moral of it. It was about a man that kept wanting to be something else. He kept thinking that something else was better than him so he changed into numerous things until he realized that he just liked being himself. The picture that I had chosen was based on the part of the story where he was a mountain and realized that a stonecutter had more power over him than he did and so he decided to turn back into a stonecutter. I also think that this image is quite amazing looking.

Mountains photo take by Jamie O'Shaughnessy. Wikimedia Commons