Blogger#11, Gabrielle Go, Period 5, 3/4/21, Day B

 Aim: How does a writer create effects through the connotations of words and images?

Do Now: Think/Share

“What if life had a reset button?” 

As a class, we discussed things we had done in the past that we now regret. People in the class were able to share some things they regret in their life without worrying about judgement from others. For example, Ms. Peterson said that she regrets attacking her cousin because she could have accidentally killed her. Even though she did not realize the weight of her actions at the time, it is one of her regrets because the situation could have ended up much worse.

Lesson: 

After our do now, we moved onto the main part of the lesson, which was the difference between connotation and denotation, and how connotations can create certain effects in a text. Ms. Peterson explained to the class that denotation is a literal or dictionary definition of a word while a connotation is an idea or feeling that the word invokes. The example she provided to show the differences between connotation and denotation was the ocean. The ocean in a literal sense is “A large body of salt water that covers approximately 70% of the earth’s surface. Appears different shades of blue, often with waves and currents. Contains various types of plant and marine animal life.” However, some of the possible connotations are tranquility, the unknown, and power of nature. Ms. Peterson also explained that even if words have the same denotation, they might have different connotations. Her example was the different connotations in the words “youthful” and “childish”. Youthful has a positive connotation because it can mean bright, energetic, or lively while childish implies immature or juvenile. She then showed us a video to summarize the information and give a little bit of practice on identifying positive and negative connotations, as well as an opportunity to earn team points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz9V1FfC6bA 

She also provided a resource to look over on our own time in case anyone was still struggling or just wanted extra practice.

https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-connotative-words.html 

An additional resource that might help is Khan Academy

https://www.khanacademy.org/ela/cc-5th-reading-vocab/x798e47233e450b09:cc-5th-athletes-in-action/x798e47233e450b09:applying-vocabulary-knowledge/v/connotation-reading 

We were then put into our team breakout rooms to continue exploring connotation and denotation. We filled in the answers to the questions that were all based on the story “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson, which we had already read in a previous lesson.

My team tried to change the words “diving” and “swimming” because they gave a negative connotation and replaced them with more neutral verbs like “walked” and “made my way”

My team discussed how the verbs “ditched” and “bolt” had negative connotations, which made us believe that her emotions in that moment were also negative.  We changed the verbs in this sentence as well in order to make the sentence more neutral.

Lastly, we were given the first paragraph of the story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier and told to annotate the text for diction, syntax, imagery, and the effects of the connotations in her writing.  This was done by highlighting the specific sentence and using the comment feature on Google Docs to write a small explanation of our insights.

Reflection:

Overall, this lesson taught me about how certain words can have meanings other than their literal meaning, and that the connotations can differ even if the denotations are the same.  I feel like I already vaguely understood the concept before, but now I can explain and identify it much better.  At first I needed clarification on what neutral words were and struggled a little bit with finding words with neutral connotations to change the sentence, but with my team and Ms. Peterson’s help I was able to understand and complete the questions. Understanding the connotations can help you identify the tone and emotions in the story. I think that formally learning about it will help me pay attention to it more when I am reading and analyzing texts.  It is important to know denotation, connotation, and the effects of connotations because it can help you better understand a text.    It can also be applied when listening or speaking to people.  Positive or negative connotations in speech can help you convey or understand certain emotions and underlying tones.