Meisner Media is a platform where I post my best works from my English and other literature courses. I ensure that I used legal-styled text to give my website credibility, as well as a nice picture of a city landscape, and a colour perceived as classy and royal: dark blue. This is all to give the website a more professional and reputable look: in order to coincide with my work. Furthermore, I feel like this post will align nicely with my previous posts. This is because my other ones are also passionate, well-constructed works that either are or are about my best works. Each post was written with passion and care for the subject matter, they each contain pictures as visual aids, and they are laid out in a blog format so that you can see the heading for each post all at once: which acts kind of as a library or hall of fame for my greatest works: which I am very proud of.
What you’ve learned in this course, and how it will help you.
ENG4U builds off of ENG3U through reading more challenging texts, being expected to conduct deeper analyses of language and structure, as well as building off of more oral English skills: through delivering presentations, engaging in discussions, etc.
What you’ve learned in this course, and how it will help you. For me, the greatest thing that I will take away from this course is learning how to cite and find academic sources to support my opinion, as well as learning how to write papers and reports in MLA format. This is especially useful to me as I'm going to university next year and will be required to write a plethora of papers in this format. I believe this familiarity with the format as well as learning about resources to help me find solid secondary sources: from the most prestigious of authors and publishers, will certainly give me an edge over my classmates next year, and will greatly help me to succeed in my post-secondary education. So thank you, Mr. Cohen, for teaching us just this one applicable skill: among the many others, you have taught us as well. Mr. Cohen is undoubtedly the best educator I have ever crossed paths with in my young life. It will definitely be for any of my future professors to top the degree of teaching expertise that Mr. Cohen displayed throughout this course.
1. ISP: A Clockwork Orange
As soon as I heard Mr. Cohen explain the premise for A Clockwork Orange, I knew it would be my choice for the ISP presentation. The dark themes explored throughout the novel, the challenge of the new language within the novel, and the charismatically manipulative main character: Alex were just some of the things that drew me in. Thus, I chose to read the book; research everything about its plot; characters; author; impact and inspirations; and then compile these ideas into a presentation. I believed, like anything in life, this went well for me because of the passion I had for the subject matter. It was easy to do the research and to read the book: because it didn't feel like work, it instead, felt like fun. I spent hours formulating my ideas in the presentation, going back and forth in my mind as to the seemingly endless layers of ambiguity and subliminal meaning in the novel: which I believe shone through in the presentation through the well-developed and supported ideas that I brought forth. I am most proud and was most excited to find out the range of well-known inspirations taken from the novel: from David Bowie to Heath Ledger, people I idolized were similarly inspired by the contents of this novel: which is probably my biggest positive takeaway from the presentation.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SJoZBkPVN_e3IdeS66AXAZD5Ymny9V4fHmINdan47Ig/edit?usp=sharing
2. King Lear poster
After completing the reading of Shakespeare's King Lear, especially coming from the perspective of reading King Lear's lines for the class, I was especially interested in analyzing moments of Lear's power and morality: feeling a larger connection because many of the quotes I used in my presentation has come out of my own mouth in reading the play. The liberty to analyze any quotes from the extract and rank them based on our opinions was very freeing and fun to do. Furthermore, creating the poster was a fun and unique experience that doesn't come by often in high school. I feel this presentation went well for me for a reason very similar to the ISP presentation: I was passionate and attached to the subject. This allowed working on the poster to similarly feel like a fun and thought-provoking experience. I am most proud of my rating system which I felt stayed very consistent throughout. I took every quote and situation subjectively, and ensure that they were all rated among the same scale and criteria: which caused my ratings to differ from many other students, but it felt more accurate and true to my interpretation of the novel: which I felt was a great moment of resilience for me.
3. Practice Adapting famous writers
Building on the theme of my most passionate works being my best: I believe this practice assessment that I wrote as author Chuck Palahniuk, writing one of my favourite books: Fight Club was one of my best of the course. I had so much fun getting to create my own take on the plot of this novel. Furthermore, I found writing in Palahniuk's ambiguous and repetitive manner further entertaining as it allowed me to hide subliminal meaning in many areas throughout the text. I thought this went well because of the amount of freedom that I was given to try ambitious writing and plot techniques. I got to toy with cliffhangers, different types of punctuation, repetition and ambiguity among other things which I think made this piece an entertaining read. Yet, I am most proud of my adaptation of Palahniuk's writing style. I read a couple of pages of Fight Club before writing this piece, and I attempted to mimic as many features as I could find, and I think this turned out well.
4. Unseen Prose Analysis
In this assessment, we were tasked with finding where Charles Dickens utilized suspense in his writing of A Christmas Carol. I found this one entertaining as I am a huge fan of suspense being used in media. I believe it allows the consumer to come to their own conclusions as to what is going to happen before it happens, which allows for a unique moment after, where you get to compare your hypothesis with what's actually happened: which I believe adds a great layer of immersion, involvement and attachment to a piece of media. Thus, finding how one of the greatest writers had done this in one of his most famous texts was surely entertaining. I am surely most proud of the fact that I found virtually every way in which Dicken's could have created tension or suspense in the given extract. This assignment was a rewarding and educational experience which has stuck with me throughout this course.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y2Fex2d9ymVyTG73qMnn-HHY1b5k-5SUSfLEPdji8Jg/edit?usp=sharing
5. Poetry essay
In this assessment, we were tasked with analyzing the language and structural relations between a poet from the romantic era and a Canadian poet. Alike to the unseen prose assignment, I had a great deal of fun analyzing lines written by some literary greats, and learning from their clever use of language and structural features throughout their writing. Writing this essay allowed me to pick apart a variety of ideas from analyzing the given poems: which felt a lot like detective work. Poetry is different from novels because the shorter size of the stories' allows for subliminal meaning and clever uses of features to be hidden in higher concentration throughout the writing. This is what I am most proud of: I felt like I found many instances in which I found multiple features: both language and structural, being used in a single line, or even word. This essay allowed me insight into many clever uses of language and structure that I will certainly keep with me and look to include in future works.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ymQ5H5SnNhhp4innrnqr1ULtpsIzIcFwGUa_umgl2RU/edit?usp=sharing
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