Walcott's Poem

Derek Walcott's poem prior to Diaz's novel was put in place for a reason. After reading the first part of the book, I have more insight to it's significance. In the novel, Oscar is not well liked. He carries with him his Dominican heritage and seems to be discriminated because of it. Walcott's poem also talks about the different backgrounds of America and that without a nation backing him, he is nothing. Both the poem and Diaz are trying to say that we need to come together and accept each others backgrounds.

My Writing Thus Far...

I think my writing skills for the class are just plain average right now. Like every writer, I have a lot of room for improvement. In order to improve my writing, I first need to spend more time with it. I need to read things over more than once or twice. Another thing I need to work on to improve my writing is to make sure I'm connecting with the reader when I'm writing. I need to make sure that as I read my work, the reader will be able to understand what I'm trying to say. I can't leave them hanging. I can do this by being more descriptive and elaborating more and making sure I have proper pronoun usage. However, more than anything, I just need to simply find more time to sit down, write, and review what I have written.

Editorial Idea

I want to talk about higher education and the high cost of it. Like I talked about on the community blog, I think there are flaws in the system. It seems of more of a business and less like a place to get a good education sometimes. I understand the universities need to make money but both faculty and students get shafted equally. However, I know I can't just complain the whole time throughout the editorial, I need to have an argument and solutions for the high cost of tuition. I haven't narrowed anything down yet. It is important to me though just because I feel there needs to be some kind of overhaul. I wish someone would step in to fix some of the problems. The students don't have any say either. Everyone is affected by the high costs of education, including all the students and staff. I, like mostly everyone else, will leave college with a high debt while at the same time facing a tough job market.

All the Advice I Can Get

I wrote my memoir rough draft in a hurry last week. I didn't even have time to read it over all at once. I guess I hoped that it would just be a good memoir by itself but after the feedback I received I know now I have a lot of work ahead of me. I am going to take all the advice (although limited), and use it to better my paper. I will try to add more details and put all my emotions into it so that it can be more relatable and it will draw the readers in. In addition, I will also be sure to re-read it many times over just to catch all that my peer editors did. Hopefully I will be able to relate to their feedback. Finally, I will be sure to go back over all my grammatical errors as well. I have a long road ahead of me but I know my paper will be much better in the end.