"The Knife" Discussion

One idea that I found interesting in our class discussion about the knife is that some one mentioned that the author focuses on his work like a religion. The idea focused around the thought that the surgeon had to take vows, be cleansed before stepping into the operating room, and he also refers to the room as a temple. The idea also involved that he had been doing his profession for so long that he might actually think that it is a religion. Another part of the idea that popped up is that He might think of himself as a god because he has the power of deciding who lives and who dies.

This idea gave me an entirely new perspective about what the author was writing about. I now believe that the entire passage was about religion. I truly believe that he thinks that he is of a higher power. I also think that this is the reason why the author starts the passage by making the reader perceive the character as a killer. Possibly he thinks of religion as both good and bad. At first he took life away and then as the story goes forth he saves lives.

The Paragraph Critique Blog

In class there were many well written five part paragraphs as well as some that were not as well put together. Some of the most common weaknesses that people had was that they weren't embedding their quotes and another that I thought was fairly common was having plot summary instead of commentary. I think what needs to improved upon is being able to blend quotes into a paragraph seamlessly. Since a lot of people gave plot summary after their quotes, it would have been better for them to move it in front of the quote and merge the two so that the quote would be embedded. Simple as that... To write good topics a writer needs to sum up their paragraph in one sentence while introducing a theme and title and author. Concrete details should be chosen to match the theme as close as possible, embedded and followed with a citation. And commentary should just be what you are thinking about the quote in terms of the topic.

I think to better my own skills I need to read my paragraph thoroughly and instead of trying to find spelling or grammatical errors I need to find things I could add, such as the citations. Also i could have added one or two more sentences about the lynch mob. Then I need to think in terms of present tense, not past tense and I think I would Ace the paragraph.