My Symposium Findings

I unfortunately didn't get to stay for the entire session of the Symposium that I attended, but I did manage to catch one of the speakers. They had written a story that was about their favorite memory. The speaker brought us back to this special moment and provided the best detail that they could. This memory, to them, was something of value, but to us we had no connection to it which the author had to develop in order for her audience to understand why that memory had value. In order to accomplish this, she had to rely on metaphors and other figures of speech so that we could find some sort of relation to what she felt through our own examples of what she was describing. By the end of her story, I could kind of grasp the importance of this memory and while she described it to us I tried my best to relate a memory of my own so that I could fully comprehend the importance.

There’s a little bit of a challenge in presenting something like that to a crowd of people you most likely don’t know. How do you prepare something like that and get everybody on board with what you’re trying to describe. Not to mention, these were ENG 110 students, so it was most likely the first time they presented something like this to a crowd of strangers; I can imagine the nervousness of trying to attempt something like this. Nonetheless, this speaker did a phenomenal job and while I could understand the value of this memory to her, I could also go back into my own memories and find something similar which was pretty neat and reflective.

I have one pondering question in relation to the genre of this student’s writing. Because they are just starting their college career at UWL, I wonder how much of this piece remains true to the style that they used all through high school. Has this course changed anything in their writing or are they still utilizing the tools that they’ve used for most of their writing? I don’t think I would be able to pick that up just by listening, but it would be interesting to see how their writing evolves from this one moment to the time when they are close to graduating. That would be the only way that this style of writing would be limited, but I don’t think that’s a journey they will take to understand until they take ENG 313.