Blog Post #12: The Rainbow Prose Essay Reflection

1.          My initial essay score was a 6 and it was given by Fernanda Hurtado. After reading the rubric, Fernanda believed that my essay scored within the 6-7 range leaning towards a high 6 because my writing provided a "sustained, competent reading of the passage" and "a reasonable analysis" of the prose passage. She believed that I had some strong points and completely addressed the thesis by discussing literary devices and how they captured the woman's situation. I also "referred to the text for support" of my claims. What I could have improved on in my essay was showing more complexity and been more clear and in-depth on the ideas that I did bring up to support my thesis. Fernanda thought that I focused more on the second part of the prompt by discussing how literary devices added to the situation rather than how they characterized the women. I completely agree with the score that Fernanda gave my essay. I felt a little bit pressed for time at the end so I didn't really get to wrap up my point and finish addressing the last part of the prompt. After reading the rubric and discussing the essay in class, I feel like I was on the right track but there was a lot of things that I missed in the passage and did not address.

2.          While reading the passage, I noticed that the word "blood" was repeated multiple times as well as references to blood pulsing through the body. I considered including this in my writing but I wasn't sure how to incorporate it into my understanding of the essay. Taking advice from 5 Steps to a 5, I should pay more attention to the "certain categories that will begin to pop out to you" because "these can be the basis for the development of the body of your essay," (Rankin, Murphy 65). After finding out more information about D. H. Lawrence and his idea of "blood knowledge", I was introduced to a whole new level of complexity that I had not known about before. Lawrence was writing from a perspective that he did not believe in. He may have believed that most women would be against his idea that natural things and things of the earth were humanizing and wanted to look at things from another perspective. I think that I could have used this complexity to better elaborate on some of the ideas that I started to propose in my body paragraph.

          Looking back on what I wrote now after norming other essays that answered this prompt, I realize that there were some better literary devices that I could have identified and explained. One of the devices that I brought up was imagery which I think was solid but I could have been more specific as to what kind of imagery was used. In my essay, I also said that the imagery showed a contrast between the views of men and women. It would have made more sense if I started by directly stating contrast as a literary device. When I first read the passage, I also noticed the parallelism with in the prose's structure. I again underestimated the importance of it to the complexity of the passage and couldn't really find a place to fit it in amongst the ideas that I had already written down. One way that could help me improve on what to include and look for when quickly reading through the passage is to "check the models and rubrics for guidance for self-evaluation," (Rankin, Murphy 76).

          One literary device that I did mention was rhetorical questions. I said that the use of rhetorical questions helped to characterize the woman and her desire to achieve more but also her frustration and confusion over how to get there. While I think that I was getting somewhere with my thinking, I don't think that I touched the full purpose of rhetorical devices in this passage. The last paragraph containing the rhetorical questions is one of the most critical parts of the prose passage and I felt like I didn't completely analyze it. After having a quick discussion of the rhetorical questions in class and seeing them mentioned in the essays that we normed, I probably should have brought up the point that the women is ambitious and is confused as to why her husband is so complacent with his unchanging status of just tending to the land. The women would rather be embracing the new and ever changing world of modern society but cannot because she is bound to her husband. Through her questions, she also vaguely wonders what it would be like if women could have power and wishes that she could have the status of a men. This point would lead to more complexity because D. H. Lawrence believed that if women that desired to have men's status were given some of the roles of men, they would find that they didn't like them. I believe that I had the right general idea in my essay but could have incorporated some more important ideas and literary advices that I noticed into my writing as well as added more complexity into my analysis of the passage.