Poetry Study Goals

• Recognize the theme of a poem faster
• Understand the tone quicker
• Recognize allusions
• Know more terms
• Be able to understand the poet's overall message faster

After reading through the poetry questions in Peterson's AP English, I quickly realized what I needed to work on with poetry. When asked to find the theme of the poem, I had to re-read the poem a few times to fully understand what the theme was. I also had to do this when it came to recognizing the tone. The allusions were much harder for me to find. That is something that I most definitely need to work on this year. Same goes for the terms. Although I recognized a lot of them, there were still a few that seemed important to know. Overall though, it wasn't as bad as I thought. 

Peterson's Diagnostic Test

Well that didn't go as well as I had hoped. There I was, a few hours ago, thinking that this was going to be a piece of cake. Well, to be fair, it wasn't as hard as I thought. Section 1 was difficult at first, but after getting used to the multiple choice questions, I was fine. I was surprised at how similar all of the questions were. The Pride and Prejudice passage was probably the easiest thing to analyze. After all, that wasn't the first time I was asked to analyze a passage like that. I realized that my main struggle was poetry. This coming school year, something I should definitely work on is analyzing and recognizing the structure and styles of poems. So overall, section 1 wasn't a complete failure. I did find some things that I am good at, and some things that I will need to improve on. Section 2 on the other hand, didn't go so well. I realized that I need to become more familiar with more literary elements. Of course I know some of them from past English classes, but not enough to write a good essay on the elements used. This diagnostic test could have gone a lot better, but I am confident that in the next year I will improve my skills tremendously.