Hamlet Act One Scene One Summary

For English class, we are reading Shakespeare's Hamlet.  I have already read his other classic stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth in my previous English classes.  I really enjoy his writing and the tragedies he produced.  For act one scene one of Hamlet, are two guards in the opening scene.  One is and has been on guard for a while.  The other comes to relieve him of his duties at 1 A.M.  It is a dark and cold night with very little stars in the sky.  Two other guards come along and ask about a ghost that has been appearing every once in a while at night.  They say that it takes the shape of their former king.  One guard then responds with disdain and claims that it is just their fantasy.  Ironically, the ghost of Hamlet appears and the guards make him talk to the ghost.  They insult the ghost while trying to get it respond.  The ghost exits after a while and it returns to normal.  Shakespeare very quickly establishes the tone of the story.  It is already a dark, and eerie time when you first start reading. I am already hooked and look forward to reading the rest of the story.

2B or not 2B

Text messaging generated around 70 billion dollars in 2005.  That is over 3 times more than the Hollywood Box Office returns in that year.  That statistic is astounding considering there were only 35 texts sent per customer each month in 2001.  There is an article that debates whether or not texting is ruining the modern English language.  The argument is from John Humphrey who says, "Texters are vandals who are destroying our grammar, and pillaging our punctuation."  He has been proven wrong by a few studies that show that texting actually improves your variety and way of thinking of words.  You have to be very familiar with verbs and nouns to be able to punctuate so efficiently.  It is almost like creating a new language when people can understand one another when saying "TTYL" (talk to you later), "BRB" (be right back), or "G2G" (got to go).  Although you can understand Humphrey's point, it just isn't true.

English IV First Entry

I made this blog during Freshmen year for English. I made the title and background colors this way because it was for a DCA English blog.

The End of My Junior Year

For my English class we have to write about our best memory, something we have learned over the course of the year, and advice we would give to upcoming juniors.  I would say that the advice part would be the easiest because I have definitely made some mistakes through my junior year and I now know how to fix those.  But first, my fondest memory of my junior year would be junior challenge.  Junior challenge is where my class went to a park and played games and did team building activities to build up chemistry and friendships for our senior year.  It helped us assume the leadership role for next year and come a lot closer as a class overall.  I've learned many important things throughout my junior year.  There are so many that I can't recall any certain one to be more important than the other.  If I had to say, the most important would be to not put things off until the last minute.  Procrastination is not a good thing and here are some examples why, I got my driver's license later than most people because I waited too long to go take the test, I could have done a lot better in my classes if I didn't put off studying or waiting last minute to do homework assignments, and also almost every morning I tried to get extra sleep so I ended up waking up late and arriving to school a little late.  From all of those examples can be taken some good advice for upcoming juniors.  1: DON'T procrastinate, 2: do not come down with senioritis before you are even a senior, 3: work as hard as possible because junior year is probably the most difficult academically.  I feel like if you follow this advice, you can not only succeed in your junior year but also in life. 

In my English class we are studying poetry and literature from the 1800's.  This era of writing or entertainment is know as the Romantics or Transcendentalist stage of literature.  Following the 1700's which was strictly rationalists.  It was a very important stage in the history of literature because it kind of started the idea of using you imagination and creativity in writing.  One of the many very popular Transcendentalists was named Ralph Waldo Emerson.  He really introduced the romantics era and helped "revolt" in a way against being serious and factual all the time.  He wrote using many aphorisms, which are lines in writing that could have multiple meanings but teach a moral or lesson.  There are many aphorisms in the passage "Self Reliance".  One of my favorites would be "Be not like dumb driven cattle, be the hero in the strife."  I feel like the lesson behind those lines would be to be your own person.  Do not be conformed by others opinion of you.  Be your own person, if that means don't answer questions that you don't deem necessary to answer, then don't.  If that means not doing what the majority or crowd is doing, the don't.  It's a very common concept and many people know about it, but I feel like it applies to my life a lot.  I like the meaning of those lines and I can relate to them the most out of all the aphorisms in his writing.

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