Thesis development activities from this week> Megan Beers

             This week in class we worked in groups to create an outline for our opened ended question that we had to write on Friday. My group came up with good themes to connect with the book and the question, those themes helped us create a thesis. I feel that this process helped me quite a bit to understand more themes within the book and view different perspectives of how people saw the book. A problem that I found while writing my timed writing was that it was hard to connect with the question. The question being how does the first paragraph and chapter tell the reader what the story is going to be about? Overall this process did help me think more analytically and look into more themes of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
              Throughout the process of creating this outline we were force to find themes within the novel and connect them to the open ended question given to us. To support these themes we were to find examples and quotes within the book and analyze how they also connected to the question. For this week our focus was connecting the themes to the how the beginning of the book tells the story. Our group came up with great themes, but the best one that we found was how the character used art work to hide their true-selves. Now that I look back using this theme for my open ended question, I realized that this theme appeals more to the whole entire book rather than the beginning. Throughout our process of finding quotes we only found one that was in the first the chapter. The activities that our class did throughout this week helped me find new themes and helped me think more analytically, but it didn't really help me understand how to keep focused on the prompt for this week rather than the whole book.
               This process I believe did help me because it set up the boundaries of an open ended question. This was my first open ended question that I have had to tackle, these activities that we did this week definitely prepared me more than I would have been without preparation. This was definitely worth the work and collaboration. If I could go back and add more information I would find more examples that supported the question. Next I will think a little more about how to structure my essay as well. This week time was nit on our side because we never hide time to collaborate with other groups on their ideas which could have been really helpful when coming up with a topic to write about. it would have given me more of variety of themes to think about. It would have also helped if we could have had more time to review our entire outline with the teacher, so we could have gotten advise on what to fix and about connecting it back to the question. Overall I think this experience has taught me how to find themes and look for reoccurring symbols that support those themes.