Personal Reflection

The classic novel study has made me realize how important being concise is, yet also how difficult it is to do so with a wider audience. Concision is clarity; the shorter the time it takes to make your point, the more content your audience will remember and comprehend. However, when most of your audience hasn't read the piece you're analyzing, they're lacking insight into your inferences, and interpretations. The only way you can give a general audience some insight is by giving them a brief synopsis of the portion of the plot you're analyzing.

Considering this issue has made me a stronger reader. I'm now able to synthesize what I've read in a more comprehensible way to myself. As a result, I am able to write a brief yet detailed enough synopsis that my readers can feel that they're on the same line of thought as myself. Undoubtedly, having a broader audience has made me write more generally; I have begun leaving out more minutiae. Unless your audience is already enlightened on your subject, you must absolutely leave out these lovely embroideries to your meaning; if your audience doesn't understand them, they cannot appreciate them.

Reading The Three Musketeers has broadened my understanding of literature. The initial stereotype I gave classics was that they were always written in a formal manner, mostly because a majority of the world's defined classics were written in drastically different time periods from the present. Dumas proved my assumption wrong. While he certainly lavishes in formal language occasionally, his diction is still relatively simplistic. Although formality was lacking, the novel remained a captivating read. Clearly it's not a quantity of superior diction that manufactures a classic, but the quality of the plot itself.

I have come to the realization, like many, that I learn best from tales with which I can relate. The novel gave me many insights into human nature; our cumbersome pride, our blind yet admirable passion, our vile lust for vengeance, and of course, our saviour; rationality. These are all characteristics a teenager must learn to balance. Teenagers often have intense emotions and they are often applied when reading literature.

Perhaps these strong emotions make teenagers good literary critics. In my apologia, I discussed how a true classic is eternal; we often relate immortality to maintaining youth. For a novel to be a classic, maybe it needs to appeal to a contemporary entity: teenagers.

Teenagers typically aren't at their intellectual peak, but they're certainly at their peak of emotions. Emotions are one of the major criteria to which authors have to appeal. So, as a teenager, I find that as I read more classics, I have a more and more valid opinion on literature.