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Primary and secondary source essay
Primary sources vs secondary sources essay
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I finally finished reading the first three chapters of “Fun Home,” a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. The book is quick to read, but not an easy one! I do not understand the novel and reading the first few chapters made me uncomfortable. The book is controversial with many intimate sexual moments and its compromises my personal beliefs and values. I also did not know how to react to Bechdel's tumultuous relationship with her gay father, Duke, while coming to terms with her own sexuality. However, I strongly believe that this graphic novel allows young people to open up about their own lives and to share their struggles. In addition, “Fun Home” portraits many important issues, such as mental health, human right, and interpersonal relationship. …show more content…
Both of them are very important elements of the writing process. Most of us think that a completed first draft means little improvement is needed. However, even experienced writers need to improve their drafts. In my opinion, writing has always capacity to profit from improvement and revision!
I completely, agree that writing can be collaborative, because other people's reactions to the writing can help to improve it. We all write for the audience and using peer reviews and editing checklists can assist revising and editing process. I also agree that the physical appearance of the essay affects the argument that we make. When I finished my first draft, I tried to follow the MLA format with all the guidelines. Hope my first draft is pleasant to hold and attractive to read!
In our third essay we had to use multiple secondary sources to discuss how it relates to our argument about the primary source. Chapter 10 was very helpful to see how to incorporate multiple quotations into the writing. I understand that essay #3 should be about my own ideas and quotation should merely help me to support those ideas. However, it was very difficult to explain in my own words and make parallels between the readings that I chose. I hope, I guide the reader through my text and explain the
Alison Bechdel wrote Fun Home as a memoir so that people understood the impact her father had on her. She went into great detail in this memoir about her childhood and moments after her father’s death. Which she claims her dad was a suicidal. During the memoir, she describes her relationship with her father. All issues, lessons, and arguments she had with her father are really significant to her. She uses her relationship with her father as the main point in the memoir. Their relationship had its ups and downs but she had very strong feelings for her father. Even though her father did not treat her as a girl most of the time, she managed to get over the fact of her father’s behavior.
Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship between Bruce Bechdel and his family and his attempts to disguise his homosexuality by creating the image of an ideal family, themes which are prevalent throughout the rest of the nook.
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bechdel uses the theme of appearance versus reality to highlight her relationship with her father. Bechdel utilizes her illustrations and short sentences to reveal these things about herself and her father. Bechdel opens her memoir with a chapter entitled “Old Father, Old Artificer”. Bechdel refers to her father, Bruce Bechdel, as an artificer because she sees him as a skilled craftsman. Bechdel describes, “His greatest achievement, arguably, was his monomaniacal restoration of our old house.” (Bechdel 4). Her father restored their old house to make it look like a huge mansion. Bechdel knows that this is just the appearance of their household because it is not an accurate representation of their family life inside the house. Bruce created an appearance that was the opposite of reality to cover up the actual wealth of their family. He hides the fact that his family may not be as wealthy and perfect as they appear to be. In this case, Bruce reveals he believes that appearance is more important than the reality of a situation. Appearance is also important on the inside of the home as well. Bechdel mentions, “Sometimes, when things were going well, I
In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel entitled Fun Home, the author expresses her life in a comical manner where she explains the relationship between her and her family, pointedly her father who acts as a father figure to the family as she undergoes her exhaustive search for sexuality. Furthermore, the story describes the relationship between a daughter and a father with inversed gender roles as sexuality is questioned. Throughout the novel, the author suggests that one’s identity is impacted by their environment because one’s true self is created through the ability of a person to distinguish reality from fictional despotism.
Alison Bechdel uses her graphic memoir, Fun home, to explore her relationship with her father. She uses the book as a tool to reflect on her life and the affect her father had on her. She discovers how her fathers closeted sexuality affected her childhood and her transition into adulthood. His death left a powerful mark and left her searching for answers. She clearly states this when she says, “it’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him.” (23). This feeling drove her to look back on their relationship and find what binds her so strongly to a man she never understood.
Discuss this statement and show how your critical understanding of the text has been strengthened by at least two different readings.
Alison’s sexuality in Fun Home is similar to her father's; the family is conscious about both sexualities, yet do not acknowledge it. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home very early in the book, both Alison’s and Bruce’s Sexualities are revealed. Both family members keep their sexualities hidden from the other family members. Alison admits on page 74 that she has been a feeling of doubt about her sexuality ever since 13 and she had seen the word “lesbian in her dictionary “ I'd been having qualms ever since I was 13.” Alison had been questioning her sexuality ever since a young age; But she only came to terms with her sexuality at the age of 19. Similarly her dad only came to terms with his sexuality after he married Alison’s mom. Eventually he came
In the graphic novel Fun Home, by Allison Bechdel, sexual self-discovery plays a critical role in the development of the main character, Allison Bechdel herself; furthermore, Bechdel depicts the plethora of factors that are pivotal in the shaping of who she is before, during and after her sexual self-development. Bechdel’s anguish and pain begins with all of her accounts that she encountered at home, with her respective family member – most importantly her father – at school, and the community she grew up within. Bechdel’s arduous process of her queer sexual self-development is throughout the novel as complex as her subjectivity itself. Main points highlight the difficulties behind which are all mostly focused on the dynamics between her and her father. Throughout the novel, she spotlights many accounts where she felt lost and ashamed of her coming out and having the proper courage to express this to her parents. Many events and factors contributed to this development that many seem to fear.
With “Shitty First Drafts” the focus is more on overcoming fear and forgetting judgement to allow the creative thoughts flow freely. Once the writing is done, the writer can return to their work and revise however they see fit. The disadvantage of this method, however, is that the writer could end up with something chaotic, and time-consuming to reorganize and edit. This is even suggested in “Accordions, Frogs, and the 5 Paragraph Theme”. With practice and knowledge of basic organization skills, authors are able to save precious editing time and keep a readable train of thought into something effective. Conversely, adhering purely to a reliable formula, however adaptable, may cause a dependency to occur. If a writer is unable to stray outside of their formula or expand beyond their comfort zone, they may end up with content that is stale and
In the beginning of English 101 I was what you call a novice writer a person who only wrote what they felt was required. However, certain techniques that I learned in English 101 made me realize that writing was not about filling requirements; it’s about speaking out, exploring and proving a point. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” (Trimble, 17) In John Trimble’s quote he tries to point out that writing is something that you grow with and learn as you go along. I believe this growth was achieved with a technique that was introduced to me by my professor called repetitive revision. What I found out was that revision of your essays helps in recognizing your mistakes and enhances the flow of your essays. By providing me...
Similar to my “one and done” mentality, my lack of revision on my writing pieces is because of meer laziness. Revision is in fact very important because it offers you the chance to look at your writing pieces from a critical perspective. It allows you to analyze all of your points and change anything that needs to be changed for the better. In Shitty First Drafts, I like how Anne Lamott describes this process as dental work. She says, “check every tooth, to see if it 's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy”. This sums up revision in an very alternative and pictorial way. Lamott and Shirley Rose would see eye to eye in the subject of revision because in All Writers Have More To Learn, Rose discusses what I conveyed to be a form of revising called Externalization. Rose states that Externalization allows the writer to see how clearly it reads, what it is conveying, and if it can be improved in any way. In conversation I feel Kathleen Yancey would introduce a similar yet interesting outlook on revising to Rose and Lamott because in Learning to Write Effectively Requires Different Kinds of Practice, Time and Effort, Yancey illustrates revision in the form of seeing if what you wrote was what you thought you were writing and the question of if it will fit with the perception of the audience. I thought that this was a pretty interesting outlook for Yancey to develop in the context of
In chapter one, “Old Father, Old Artificer”, of her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the young Bechdel generated her identity through the tensions and mysteries that engulfed her family the home. Masculinity, physical strength and a modern outlook were her personality traits as she grew, becoming the “Butch to [her father’s] Nelly” (269) and his opposite in several aspects. A conscious effort was made on her part to set her own pace from what her father expected of her. He was a strong, influential figure within her life. Expressing emotions towards her father was strictly not allowed in the home. Bechdel was left “rushing from the room in embarrassment” (273) on the one unforgettable occasion that she went to kiss him goodnight. She...
In her novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel recalls the difficulty to communicate to her father who seemed to live in an entirely different world than her. Her father is a mystery; hiding his homosexuality behind an elaborate lie. Often depicted as distant and angry he turns out to be possibly the most influential person to Bechdel. He has many flaws but Bechdel explains she is thankful for some of those since they helped form who she is today, and ultimately is the reason she is alive. The only way to elucidate her father to the audience was to use those same fictional literary works to describe her father’s true character that he lived in because when conversations weren’t present there were still connections between them two through books.
Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. It is known as a recursive process. Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document and it is the planning phase. It includes thinking, taking notes, talking to others, brainstorming, outlining, and gathering information. Drafting occurs when you put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. Here you concentrate upon explaining and supporting your ideas fully. The first five traits are essential for effective revision of content are Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, and Sentence Fluency. While you are revising, you might have to return to the prewriting step to develop and expand your
I declare that the work which follows is my own and that any quotations from any sources (e.g. books, journals, the Internet) are clearly identified by the use of single quotation marks for shorter excerpts and indented italics for longer quotations. All quotations and paraphrases are accompanied by (date, author) in the text and a fuller citation in the bibliography. I have read and understood the rules on paraphrasing and referencing and followed these conventions carefully.