This week was essentially the ending to what we have been building up to. We have been working on elements of literary fiction projects, and we presented them. It was really interesting to see presentations about the other elements of fiction, and how authors use them in their stories to make their work more interesting or how it makes their writing more meaningful. Through the use of symbols, they can achieve compression. I know this because that was my main focus throughout the time. The rest of the topics were helpful for me because they helped me understand how certain elements of writing worked. I feel that in the future I will read an author's story and be able to relate what they wrote to these projects, and maybe realize their writing isn't as clever or crazy as I thought it was.
To me, there's no better way to know you've learned something than judging your ability to teach it. If you're able to teach something to someone, you obviously know the topic at least fairly well. That's why I think it's good to have groups present. The only way to prepare to teach something to someone is to further your understanding of it, or maybe learn it in different ways than you already have if possible. Due to these reasons, I found this to be a very effective and efficient assignment. Overall, I think I learned a good deal this week about symbolism and theme. I learned quite a bit about the other elements as well, but mainly symbolism.