Week 8 Reading and Writing

The demon king Ravana

Source

This picture was from my week 3 reading post. The reason this picture stood out to me, is that it really helped me better visualize what Ravana looked like. When I first started reading, the concept of the rakshasas puzzled me. The multiple limbs that they possessed made me think of an insect-looking thing, whereas this picture helped me better understand and visualize what the rakshasas looked like.

When looking back at my earlier blog posts, I have realized that I have an issue of writing too much or too little when taking notes. In my earlier reading posts, I would basically retell the entire story as if I were talking with a friend. This lead to fairly long blog posts over mid-small sized stories. As the weeks went on and I got used to the flow of this class, I began taking more condensed notes. Granted, this was during the Ramayana and Mahabharata readings, which were reading assignments that were split into 80 pages. Here, I would take notes per page, and these notes would range from 1-2 sentences to a small paragraph. What I have noticed is that I have a hard time taking notes on reading assignments that don't peak my interest. During the Ramayana, the pages where I took only 1-2 sentences worth of notes were the same pages that I don't really remember that well. At the same time, the pages where I took notes that ended up being a paragraph or so in length where the stories that I remember vividly. I know that writing a paragraph of notes for every story I read will not only waste time, but it will lead to me becoming increasingly disinterested in the reading and dreading every week's reading assignment. Instead, I plan on taking a minimum of 2 sentences per page, and I want to focus on writing more on the stories that don't interest me. I think that a blog post full of 3-4 sentences of notes per story will result in better retaining the entirety of the story, not just key moments that stuck out to me.