Hello! My name is Mary Lee Ptacek; I’m one of the people who added the class after the first session, so you probably know very little about me. I’m from Kansas City, MO, and I’m a junior, previously a political science major but now English and International Studies with a political science minor. I’m also a pre-law scholar, but my desire to go to law school is vanishing fast. I spent last spring studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary, which was an amazing experience. I now know more about communism than I ever wanted to know, but I also got to meet people from all over Europe and see some incredibly cool places.

As an English major, naturally, I enjoy and look forward to English class. That being said, I am a little rusty, as my last two English classes (one at SLU and one abroad) have both been very specific, focusing on one Russian playwright (Chekhov) and love in Shakespeare and Eastern European literature (random, but true). I love grammar and punctuation usage, but tend to overdo the commas. I am also inclined to see symbols everywhere, so I apologize in advance for that. My goals for this class are to learn more about the significance of speaking and silence in rhetoric and literature, to create presentations I am truly proud of, and to improve my analysis skills.

I have mixed feelings about silence. In my own life, I was very much silent throughout elementary school; I probably should have been more silent in high school (way too much gossiping goes on at an all-girls school), but I think I have found the proper balance now. In Budapest, I was forced to be silent all the time, as Hungarian is an incredibly difficult language to learn and I was not confident in speaking what little of it I knew. Also, on the public transportation in Hungary almost everyone is silent, which I found very strange since in the U.S. we are constantly talking on our phones or to our friends, or sometimes even to the stranger sitting next to us. However, I also think it is important to make time for silence, so that we might reflect and appreciate our lives more.

I like to listen to other people speaking. When I went to Italy in high school with my Latin class, my best friend talked for almost the entire trans-Atlantic flight about a summer camp she had gone to and I listened to every detail almost completely silently. But for me, it’s important to speak only when you have something significant to say. That’s not a very good answer, so hopefully this class will help me form a better opinion about speaking!