Project Title: Exploring all types of Love

Essential Question(s):

What does love feel like?

Statement of Purpose

For my Senior Project, I will be reading and annotating classic love stories, exploring love in all forms. I will also be taking classes that teach me how to write better. In the end, I also plan on having stories that I will have written.

Overview: Describe your topic and project to the committee.

In my project, I will be reading different love stories and annotating them intently. I will be exploring all types of love, romantic love, friend love, family love, and so on. By reading these stories and writing my own love stories, I hope to explore what it means feels like to love someone. I also hope to explore what qualities in people draw me to them. I also hope to question my own assumptions about love, intimacy, attraction, communication, desire, compassion, honesty, integrity and come to possibly redefine them by the end of the project. Writing and reading for 4 hours 7 days a week won’t be easy, but I am motivated to explore love, as well as becoming more articulate and knowing through the novels I read. I think that my motivation to become a more articulate, knowledgeable person will push me to complete this project, and complete it well. My appreciation for reading novels came to me in 10th grade while reading the Great Gatsby. I will never forget the quote that inspired my fondness of words: “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer”. Everything about this quote was magical. My predilection for English was intensified when I took Jane’s Short Story writing class in my junior year. We delved deep into the stories we read, mulling over every sentence, and thus discovering what made them impactful. In that class, I learned how to read critically and carefully, and write with precision and clarity. One significant thing I learned from that class was that verbs are powerful, and that in general, the more specific the verb the writer used, the clearer they could get their center of gravity (main idea) across, which is always the goal in writing, whether one is writing a story or sending an email to a teacher . This project will exercise and improve my critical thinking skills. Writing my own story will exercise my creativity. Being vulnerable and intimate in the story I write and then sharing it will take courage. All of this will prepare me to become an active member of society as an adult in this world.

How will you measure your success?

I want to get better at being articulate and becoming a more attentive reader. I will measure my success on the quality of my annotations, the quality of my documentation at the end of each day, and on the quality of my story. I will also measure my success by sharing my story with my cohort leaders and they will tell me what they think.

Resource List 

Classes:

the SAY organization for my one-on-one writing course

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/malcolm-gladwell-teaches-writinghttps://www.masterclass.com/classes/neil-gaiman-teaches-the-art-of-storytelling

https://www.coursera.org/learn/craft-of-plot.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/writing-editing-words

 

Daily Plan & Schedule + Documentation Plan

How I plan to spend my time + documentation plan:

The first week of my project will be different than weeks 2-6. For the first week I will be taking one 20 hour course ( https://www.coursera.org/learn/writing-editing-words ), and then 3, 5 hour courses. https://www.masterclass.com/classes/malcolm-gladwell-teaches-writing

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/neil-gaiman-teaches-the-art-of-storytelling

https://www.coursera.org/learn/craft-of-plot. I will take notes from these classes in a document. I will refer to this document when writing my story. 

Weeks 2-6 of my project will look different: 

Every day I will spend 2 hours reading and annotating, and 2 hours writing my story. During my annotations, I will specifically focus on words, and how they affect my thinking. At the end of the day, I will document what I learned. For the books I’m reading, I can make a spreadsheet documenting the book, and how many pages I read that day. I will be working with a professional writer for 2 hours every week that I have already scheduled and they will help me with my story. Each week I will be reading a different book. I will be actively reading the book as well as annotating it. The books I plan on reading and annotating:

• • 100 Years of Solitude

• Love in The Time of Cholera

• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Anna Karinena 
• A Tale of Two Cities 
• Gone With the Wind
• Wuthering Heights 
• The Bluest Eye,

Material Needs

I am buying all of the books I need. I am also paying for the 4 online courses that I have set up for myself. The one-on-one writing program was offered to me for free.

Backup Plan

My mom’s friend who is an English teacher agreed to critique my work and help me write my story if my one-on-one writing session doesn’t work out.