Blog Reflections

Looking through my past blog posts I have noticed that they have become more detailed and in depth. I have read a total of four books this trimester. I used Good reads and found out about the Divergent series which 3/4 of my blog posts were about. I chose to read Divergent because it had good ratings and a lot of my friends were reading it. I noticed in my past blog posts I didn’t explain very well and I wasn’t as interested in the book I was reading so I read less often. The quality of my writing has improved immensely over the course of the trimester, my first blog post compared to my last are very different. You can tell by my use of vocabulary and detail in my last post compared to my first post that I have improved a lot. An example of my first blog post is; “The theme of my book is that with every good thing that happens a bad thing follows shortly afterwards. For example my main character Ren, gets adopted when his chances were very slim which was fantastic but; he doesn't get the "perfect" family that he has always dreamed of. A quote that supports this from my book is "We all need prayers," Said Brother Joseph. "Especially when something good happens to us" He sighed. "Bad luck follows anything that’s good" (Tinti 12).” What I said in my first blog post wasn’t bad, I like how I included a quote from the book and stated the theme. Now here is an example of my most recent blog posts; The new discovery is that the Bureau gave Jeanine Matthews the serums! So they helped her kill the Abnegation. Why? I don't know, I suppose they do whatever is best to heal the genetically damaged people. They will stop at nothing to do so, and kill as many people as they want. Tobias recently discovers that he is a GD and this informer Nita who works at the Bureau explains how the government has treated GD's so badly and that we have had wars before people were GD. So the question to ask is, why waste time fixing the GD? The tragic event that occurred was a plan to steal death serums in order to get revenge on the Bureau. Nita however told Tobias that they were going to steal the memory serum. A series of explosions occur and Uriah gets hurt. He still remains unconscious. Later on Tris and everyone teams up with some Nita and her inside people in the Bureau as well as some people from this place called the fringe.” I paraphrased on my most recent blog post and really summarized what happened in the book and included a lot more detail. I also can tell just from comparing the two blog posts that I was more passionate about the book and enjoyed reading it more than reading my summer reading book. I think this was because I didn’t really have a wide range of options to choose from. One strength I had while blogging was summarizing and including a vast amount of detail. Also my use of vocabulary was good. I struggled with coming up with a topic to blog about, I didn’t really like going off the writing prompts because I felt restricted into only writing about one certain topic. I overcame this by explaining what was going on in my book. In other words I included a brief summary of what I read. Then I made predictions and included my opinion and thoughts on the book. Although I did not meet my goal I am still proud of what I have learned and read this trimester. I gained a lot of knowledge and learned a lot of lessons just about life in general from reading these books. I also have expanded my vocabulary and common sense. I now understand what is it like to have no one you can trust; like the character Tobias from the Divergent series. I also made some strong connections with the character Tris from Divergent. So a vast majority of my learning has come from the Divergent series. I highly recommend reading this series if you haven’t already. My experiences while reading these books have taken me on an emotional roller-coaster. The books are very action packed and unexpected. There are many cliff hangers and a lot of imagery and diction; as well as figurative language. So overall, I think I have improved a lot in my reading skills and writing skills.

Unwrapping Allegiant

 

As a follow up on last week’s predictions for this book I have recently "unwrapped" new secrets and some tragic event does occur so my prediction was correct. Although I do think that something even bigger will occur. The new discovery is that the Bureau gave Jeanine Matthews the serums! So they helped her kill the Abnegation. Why? I don't know, I suppose they do whatever is best to heal the genetically damaged people. They will stop at nothing to do so, and kill as many people as they want. Tobias recently discovers that he is a GD and this informer Nita who works at the Bureau explains how the government has treated GD's so badly and that we have had wars before people were GD. So the question to ask is, why waste time fixing the GD? The tragic event that occurred was a plan to steal death serums in order to get revenge on the Bureau. Nita however told Tobias that they were going to steal the memory serum. A series of explosions occur and Uriah gets hurt. He still remains unconscious. Later on Tris and everyone teams up with some Nita and her inside people in the Bureau as well as some people from this place called the fringe. The fringe is a poverty blown place outside the city. What I question is why the government doesn’t just help the people and give them food and shelter instead of trying to fix their stupid genes. Also, why are they hiding the history of our world from everyone? There are so many secrets to unravel still and I ponder on what is going to come next. I like the use of the author’s words that get to you emotionally. She uses great diction and figurative language and has a mass amount of imagery. I admire her writing greatly and enjoy her books.

Predictions for Allegiant

So far in my book the Allegiant group has escaped the city and ventured beyond the city walls to come to find some very interesting information. People from a place called the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. It was established because scientist tried to alter people’s genes to make the "bad genes" go away; this only caused more problems and created genetically damaged people. To create pure people they set up the faction system in Chicago as well as in many other cities. The Divergent are actually the pure genetic people. So Tris and Tobias are pure! Caleb and Tris find out that they're mother was an outsider who was put into the factions to solve the problem of people killing the Divergent. When the group of people that left the city find all this out they are astonished on how little they know. They don’t know what America is or what airplanes even are!! All of this fascinated me and made me excited to read on.

I predict that Tris and the others will live outside the fence and try to come up with a plan to fix the now disorientated city of Chicago. I also sense that more problems will also occur. From listening to my peers it seems as the book has an unexpected tragic ending so I’m fearful to find that out. I love these series and I really hope I’m satisfied with the ending! For now I will continue to read on and discover new things about Tris and her family. This book reminds me of the book “The Maze Runner” By James Dashner. People have their memories erased and live in an enclosed place like the factions; people have certain jobs and are separated. Scientist study and observe them to shape society in order to prevent war so both of the books have the same type of theme.