Blog Reflections

After reviewing my blogs from this year, I have noticed that they have become a lot more detailed and descriptive. In the beginning, I struggled with using textual evidence and supporting my claims and opinions. As I kept writing my blogs, this started to improve. By my last blog post, I was fluently using evidence from the text and I was supporting my statements. Throughout my blogging experience, I have always been good at summarizing what I had read that week. I would use detailed claims and make thoughtful inferences. Along with this, I made connections well between texts. My quality of writing has improved tremendously over this trimester of blogging. In the beginning of my blogging experience, I would be very straight-forward with the details I used. Instead of acknowledging important details within the text, I would give a very brief summary of what I had read. An example of this is my first blog post, “Summer Reading”. It was about the summer reading book I had read, Water for Elephants. In that post, I stated, “One of my favorite things about it is how much the characters developed over the time span in the book. As I read, Jacob was the character that really stood out to me. He is the main character and the point of view is through his eyes. As the book continues, Jacob interacts more and more with the circus crew where he ends up. On the circus train, he meets Marlena, who also develops throughout the book. While Jacob develops feelings for Marlena, more and more information about her is revealed. Marlena is not the only major character Jacob interacts with. He also becomes very close with Rosie, an elephant.” As you can see from this section of my blog, I used very vague terms and did not go into much description about what actually happened in the text. I just gave a basic overview about the facts of the characters. In my most recent blog, “Inferences”, I described the characters in much more detail and gave an example from the text, “Tris has started to redeem herself from her fight with Peter, in which she lost and got extremely injured. She does this by proving her thoughtfulness in an intense game of capture the flag. The trainees are split into two teams: those chosen by Four and those chosen by Eric. Tris is picked by Four, whom everyone on the team has a very lean and thin body structure.” An example of where I used a quote is later in that blog post and says, “Four rebalance by placing a hand on one of her hips and pushing her up to the next rung. She becomes very unsteady by this action and describes the following: ‘I feel the ghost of where his had was, his fingers long and narrow,’ (Roth 161).” Along with adding in more description of the characters, I also stated the reasoning behind the decisions they made. I developed well thought-out inferences and predictions. In the end, I am very happy I got to write blog posts every week because, not only did it help me develop more thoughtful writing, it allowed me to further understand what I was reading.

Inferences

Currently in Divergent, the Dauntless trainees have almost completed stage one of initiation. Tris has started to redeem herself from her fight with Peter, in which she lost and got extremely injured. She does this by proving her thoughtfulness in an intense game of capture the flag. The trainees are split into two teams: those chosen by Four and those chosen by Eric. Tris is picked by Four, whom everyone on the team has a very lean and thin body structure. After hiding the flag, Four’s team starts to argue about strategies of capturing Eric’s team flag. While the team is bickering, Tris decides to climb to the top of a broken down Ferris wheel. Four follows her to make sure she is okay. This is when I first started to make an inference: Four is very interested in Tris. On the Ferris wheel, Tris loses her balance.  Four rebalance by placing a hand on one of her hips and pushing her up to the next rung. She becomes very unsteady by this action and describes the following: “I feel the ghost of where his had was, his fingers long and narrow,” (Roth 161). This indicated to me that there is a spark between Four and Tris. Another line of proof for this theory is when Tris and Four are arguing after another day of training. Four says, “You know, I’m getting a little tired of waiting for you to catch on!” (Roth 182). This made me think that Four is trying to show Tris that he is interested in her but she is not picking up the hints which is irritating him. Hopefully, later in the book Four and Tris will date and maybe even marry since their personalities correspond very well.

Possible Theme

Now in my book, Divergent, Tris is starting to go through the stages of the initiation process. If she is not in the top five initiates (based on a scoring system), she will either have to guard the gates into the city or live factionless (homeless). The first stage of initiation is fighting. Tris, who is very small and fragile, had to fight Peter, who is larger and stronger than her. On top of that fact, Peter had been giving Tris a hard time about being from Abnegation since they had first gotten there. In the fighting stage, the two opponents would fight until the other was unconscious or unable to keep fighting. Before the fight had even started between Tris and Peter, Tris already felt defeated. Although, she did hope she could beat him, when she got in the ring, Peter hit her many times. From the start, her vision blurred from being punched in the face and she fell to the ground many times. However many times she fell to the ground, though, Tris would always get back up. She kept fighting until she finally collapsed to the ground unconscious and practically broken.

I think that this chapter/ fighting stage showed a lot of Tris' character. It shows that she doesn't give up easily and she will keep fighting until she absolutely can't anymore. I believe that this could be the basis for one of the themes of the novel, also: If you pursue through challenges, you will eventually become victorious.