Based on what you have learned from the literature you have read "road not taken", think about how the research on your topic will impact your views and attitudes towards yourself, your family, your profession, your local community or society as a whole in the coming years.
Take a stand in the form of a thesis statement.
As a paragraph, your thesis statement and supporting sentences should form a cohesive argument about why your topic is important.
mlrogers, what educational level are you at, and what is "your topic"?
my topic is on a poem "road not taken" by robert frost
im graduating this july as a medical assistant with an a.s degree. can u help me. this is do tomarrow. im taking online classes and its not easy. can u give me any ideas on this assigned work?
I don’t know what an "a.s" degree is. Adult studies?
Can’t see how this assignment can be relevant to you becoming qualified as a medical assistant. Perhaps you have to take an arts subject and have chosen literature or poetry. You have my sympathy. Judged in the context of such a subject, the assignment (assuming you have quoted it correctly) suggests to me that your teacher is scarcely competent. Pompous, pretentious, presumptuous (presuming that this poem is so important that it will impact your attitudes to society as a whole), prone to clichés (“coming years”; “take a stand”), and by degree standards only semi-literate.
The upside is that almost anything you write stringing together a few organised thoughts responding to the set tasks will probably be better than your teacher can do, so you should get a reasonable grade.
I notice you have posted the poem in another thread. Let’s put it up again here.
The road not taken by Robert Frost
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20
It’s a famous poem. I don’t know what “research” on it you have done or are expected to do, besides reading and re-reading the poem and thinking about it. You can find a lot of websites commenting on it. Just Google the phrase “road not taken” together with the word “Frost”.
Perhaps you have already spent time studying this poem and “learned” that various people have suggested different interpretations of it, focusing on different features. For instance the reference to the wood being “yellow” could be taken as indicating that the poetic persona faced a choice of paths in the autumn of life, i.e. late in life. On the other hand, the reference to “ages and ages hence” suggests the perspective of a young person envisaging a long future. The poem title, referring to the road not taken, rather than the one taken, suggests that the persona’s main preoccupation is what might have been had he/she chosen the other path. That could be in the melancholy spirit of a well known couplet by John Greenleaf Whittier:
Of all the words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: it might have been.
On the other hand, there’s very little in the body of the poem suggesting sadness or focusing on what might have been. Just the word “sigh” in the last stanza. The persona concludes simply that the choice of one path instead of the other “made all the difference”. It could be a difference for good or for bad.
It’s not a difficult poem to understand without searching for subtleties. The poetic persona recalls a moment when a choice of paths had to be made, and there was no information to indicate which would be the better. It wasn’t possible to choose both. (The famous baseball coach Yogi Berra once said :”If you come to a fork in the road, take it”, but I believe he added or implied “and then keep an eye out for the knife and spoon”; so his advice wouldn’t have helped!) The persona made a choice, and of course the choice had consequences. Nothing complicated in that concept.
In reality, life is full of such moments of choice, and one way or another we make choices and move on. If you need Robert Frost’s poem to make you aware of that, you could say it’s an important poem which will impact your views and attitudes, etc., but I suspect that’s something you know well enough already by commonsense.
If you enjoy poetry, as I do, you might even learn this Frost poem by heart, so you can recite it to others (or even to yourself if you have no one to talk to), and that might make you feel happy, and cause your views and attitudes towards everything and everyone specified in the assignment to be more positive. To that limited extent the poem could be important.
If I had to do your assignment, I would probably approach it along those lines. But please don’t follow my ideas on this unthinkingly. I might be leading you down quite the wrong path. Especially as I know nothing of the syllabus you have been studying, or of the background to your assignment.
Make up your own mind how to write your "thesis statement", etc. If anything I have said above helps in that, well and good. But it’s quite possible I am being no help at all.
Ian
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2008 08:19PM by IanAKB.
But it’s quite possible I am being no help at all.<
Unlikely, Ian, in the face of such a masterful summary.
If I had known of that news story Johnny, I might have restrained my criticisms of the assignment, just in case by some unfortunate coincidence I was undermining the noble efforts of this professor forced to operate in an exceptionally tough zone of the pearl swine interface. In the words of the old song, some pupils need to be taught to the tune of a hickory stick.
But mlrogers did say he/she was studying online.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2008 10:29AM by IanAKB.
"Nobody takes that road anymore...it's too crowded"
Yogi Berra or reasonable facsimile