Sara Anderlich- Assignment 6

    The intellectual experiences that have meant the most to me probably all happened in an English class. I love writing, reading, poetry, analyzing different pieces... and I love that there are so many different things you can look at. Writing can be an essay or poetry, but it can also be a song, with or without lyrics.  

    For me, English class has always been a place where I've learned to open my mind to the world. There are different ideas authors mean to get across and there are different perspectives to be aware of. Every piece of writing you read is going to have a personality and becoming mindful of that can be so immersive. It's (writing, reading, analyzing...) an experience that I can hardly describe. I love poetry because of this and I love music for the same reason. In a way, music is spoken poetry. You can't just read something and glaze over it, it's something you can't help but feel. It evokes emotion. In other words, I feel like English can require empathy to understand. There are so many stories, whether in a fantasy world or the author's background, that are yet to be explored with everything you read, but yet you have to pay attention to what the narrator is saying and why they're saying it. It's amazing to me, and I love being able to compare my thoughts with others. That is, if they show a similar interest.

    It's also important to note that English class has opened me up to so many more books and stories that I otherwise would know nothing about. It's part of the way that it opened my mind. Specifically, in recent years, I loved They Cage the Animals at Night, To Kill A Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet. They were just stories that otherwise I would probably know little about, and I'm thankful to have read them.