Reflection

The aspect of my writing I am going to reflect on is the use of quotes and background information in Super-SmartNotes. I have not been doing these things as prominent as they should be. Either these are not present or do give enough information.  Quoting the text is definently an important aspect of a Super-SmartNote that I was just not including. I would slightly talk about the specific passage but if not completely necessary I would not quote the text. Something to work on for next month would be quoting the text and analizize the specific quote. Another problem of mine pointed out to me by comments was the lack of background information. I now understand that giving a short but largely contented sentence with some general information about the book will really set up my thinking and better make the readers experience more elucidated.

Non-Ficton Super SmartNote

This article is called "How a Charming Doodling App Arose From the Web’s Wildest West". Its about this new app that was just released on the app store for iOS iPad. Its called DrawQuest, and its a "drawing app." Every day there is a new "quest" with a template for you to use. But the main reason for me doing this SmartNote is the central purpose of this app. See you can use this template but you don't have to. So if being creative is not your forte you can use the template to get started. If you are creative, (or you think you are) you can just draw right over the template. The creator of this app was very smart in this and I think created a great product for anybody to get better at their own artistic talent.
Read the original article here!

SSN

In my book, the main character, Rafe is moving to a new school to be a artist. He is my age but in this Super SmartNote I wanted to focus more to "get to know" the character. He reminds me of a young Ponyboy Curtis. Minus the artistic ability, these characters both contradict themselves to make themselves feel better. But I don't think I know Rafe enough to say that about him. Most of the time, you know when Rafe is lying because of the illustrations in book or because of the voice the author gives him. I would say Rafe is a young Ponyboy especially because of his imaginary friend. Rafe has an imaginary friend and I think in his case its for approval of his lost brother. The imaginary friend is what he thinks his brother is. His brother passed when he was young. Maybe Rafe wants approval from his fake brother or he wants closure for someone he hasn't even met. I will be sure to visit this topic again.

Writing Reflection

My writing, from the beginning of the year, has defiantly improved. Since the start of my 7th grade writing career, Ms. Capelli has made it very easy to grow into a better writer. When faced with problems, our class could always conference with her, and then in the future Ms. Capelli always looked for it in our writing to see if we improved. This "system" allowed, at least for me, and if not the whole class to help improve my writing. As the year goes into its 2nd half, I hope to become an even better writer than what I have grown to now.  

Reflection

Even though this last month was very short for school days due to the holiday break, there are still some things to reflect about. In late November, I started a new book, the graveyard book. I have never read scary books before but I thought how bad can it be? Its just writing on a page. This new thinking now opens up lots of more books for me to read as I finish books. Picking books will now be much different because I will no longer be running away from the scary novels. I think that this is going to maybe make my reading life much better because I love to explore the new hypothetical worlds these authors create.

Super SmartNote

Passage: "Once they had a working technical prototype, the next stage was to work out the UI. 'We usually start with brainstorming and paper prototyping,' they write, 'Only after that do we start using Photoshop.'"

This article titled How Pixle Created Its Clever Cut-and-Fold Papercraft App ‘Foldify’ by Tim Maly from Wired Magazine really caught my attention because I was interested on how apps are developed. This particular passage was very interesting to me. The process of how this team even started was very cool. They would first sit down and brainstorm for a long time before even opening a computer. This app is used on the iPad to create print-outs that you fold to create a 3 dimensional paper fold. In this passage the developers are talking about the UI (or user interface.) This is what the app is going to look like. For example the buttons. They had to decide what the "theme" of the app was going to be before they started designing it.

SSN

  I an currently reading The Graveyard Book. I am not very far into the book but very quickly any reader can pick up on Neil Gailmans's writing style. This story has a lot of setting changes. When introducing a new setting Neil literally puts the reading in the scene by using the word "you". "You could see the abandoned funeral chapel, iron doors padlocked, ivy on the sides of the spire, a small tree growing out of the guttering at roof level." (12.)  Gailman goes on paragraph by paragraph starting with you and then describing the scene. I took a smartnote here because I had never seen this style of writing before. This, for me, was a great way to visualize the setting and also reveled a new perspective on introducing a setting in a text.