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Thursday, April 14, 2011

Difficulty Paper #1

For my very first difficulty paper, I'd like to speak about the first thing that I am having difficulty with between both our novel, The Scarlet Letter, and with our most recent short story, Young Goodman Brown. With both pieces of literature, I am finding it increasingly difficult to read the style of English they both use. That style of language, which to me is almost like old English, that to me resembles both the bible and works by Shakespeare, is very hard for me to understand. Because we don't speak in the same way that these works of literature were written in, it's not like our common language we use to communicate therefor it's not easy to know right off the bat what some words and phrases mean. So instead of just zooming right through the book and comprehending it the first time I read it, I have to reread sometimes even multiple times before I use contextual clues to fully understand what it is that the author is trying to say. I also have a dictionary right by my side to help me better understand some words that I've honestly never heard before. So between rereading passages, using clues in the text, and having a dictionary by my side, I have began to adopt ways of overcoming not understanding the language of the text.