In titling my first blog post To Dwell in Introductions, it seemed only fair to title this post accordingly.
I titled my blog for this course “To Dwell in Possibility” from the Emily Dickinson poem. When I graduated from middle school, my godmother gave me a necklace with those words stamped into a metal charm. Since then, I have somewhat taken the words out of their original context and added my own meaning. To me, to dwell in possibility is to dwell in the idea of what ifs, hopes, and the various outcomes the future holds. It is striking a balance between living in the present and looking toward the future.
When I started college, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’ve lived away from home before so I wasn’t worried about the independence aspect of things.With fifteen hundred students, my high school was almost exactly the same size as Washington College, so even the social aspect was not too daunting. I was fortunate to have fantastic teachers in high school that were bold enough to stray away from the Common Core curriculum plaguing many classrooms in New York. I felt academically equipped entering my first semester. Of course, because I felt so prepared, and because the universe can be cruel, college was nothing like I expected. It turned out to be a drastically different experience than portrayed in any online media conglomerate like BuzzFeed or The Odyssey, different even from what my older friends had told me. Independence is different when the environment is mostly comprised of almost-adults living in close quarters. While my high school had a similar number of students, I was caught off guard by the typical freshman terror of not recognizing anyone in the dining hall when I went for lunch. Academically, my professors had different expectations than I was used to and I found myself having to actually study for the first time.
That being said, despite their differences, my first semester classes have been informative, engaging, and interactive. My professors teach in very different styles and offer varying approaches to coursework. Arguably the piece that I benefitted the most from was a weekly blog for my English 101 class. With weekly prompts, my blog forced me to write academically on a regular basis, something I had always wanted to do that usually fell victim to procrastination. That is not to say that a lot of times my blogs were not posted eleven pm on Sunday, because they were, but it forced me to be thinking about a prompt over the week and collect my thoughts.
The idea of having a blog solely for English 101 has been an interesting one. In considering Harris’s ideas of projects, the project of my blog was very different than most anything I had previously written. I was no stranger to the idea of blogging, I’ve had my only blog since 2012, but I was both intrigued by and unsure of how to approach a blog with a rather set in stone purpose and audience. Ultimately, I decided to make my project for the blog something Harris often talks about in the idea of rewriting: using my own experiences to shape all of my posts. I wanted to use my blog to write about assigned topics in a way that represented me as an individual and as a writer. It presented me with an opportunity to write reflectively, objectively, and narratively about new concepts, while still making them my own ideas. In titling each post with “To Dwell in…,” I intended to convey the idea that my writing captured my take on things after dwelling on them in my mind, similar to the way I try to live dwelling in possibility. It was a means of pushing myself to think and write in new ways.
In high school, when presented with new writing tasks, I almost always focused on travelling of some sort. It was, and remains to be, something about which I am passionate, and the words always seem to easily flow in writing about it. However, in this class, I have aimed to extend and broaden my writing both on my blog and on the three major writing projects of the semester. While my experience abroad has shaped my perspective and worldview, I’ve come to realize over the course of this semester that this can be conveyed in the written word while not explicitly focusing on travel. In my second writing project, I used my time abroad to guide the rhetorical focus of my paper. The topic admittedly is related to travel, but it is one that I was always somewhat wary of writing, because I felt like my opinion didn’t matter. Cultural appropriation is a major contemporary issue, and I wanted my words on the matter to reflect not only my views, but so provide an approach other people should take in learning about foreign cultures. Instead of discussing the somewhat broad issue of cultural appropriation in general, I narrowed it to cultural appropriation as an exchange student, because I have an opinion on the subject. This project was my strongest because I had my opinion, but recognized its limits. For example, while I studied abroad, I am not in a position to discuss what is like having one’s culture appropriated because I am part of a dominant culture. I borrowed a working definition of cultural appropriation, extended other’s ideas about the role of exchange students, and illustrated my points with quotes and paraphrases that enriched my opinion and thesis. I countered other writer’s ideas to acknowledge the idea of a counter argument but ultimately show why my argument was stronger. My own story had its uses, but in identifying its limits I strengthened my paper as a whole and it made it more applicable to different audiences.
On the topic of enriching my thesis, the reading “Making a Thesis Evolve,” had quite the impact on my approach to theses. Previously, the thesis was always the most frustrating part of a paper for me to write. It always felt like an obstacle I had to overcome before I could get to writing the meat of the paper. Over the course of this semester, I’ve adopted the idea of a living thesis, one that grows as the paper does. I was also particularly drawn to the idea of a thesis having tension. My cultural appropriation essay tackled a topic practically synonymous with tension. My thesis reflected that, and provided an explicit disclaimer that my paper was going to express dissenting views. I’ve done this in other classes as well: for Introduction to World Politics, I found myself trying to create tension in my thesis for an essay about the novel Half the Sky.
Between the three writing projects, the weekly blog entries, and my final blog project, I’ve done a lot of thinking about my project as a writer in general, and with that my identity as a writer. I will likely always write about travel, or international affairs, or other topics that have some sort of global twist. It’s shaped my past, and will likely guide my future. I don’t have to shy away from travel writing, but rather recognize that my experiences have granted me with a unique perspective on issues far broader than what it’s like to go to a foreign country.
I’ve titled my final blog To Dwell in Possibility as well, because while I’ve come to terms with what kind of writing I do best, I will continue to dwell in the possibility that there are new projects for me to tackle, new places for me to explore, and new things about which I can write. I look forward to rewriting, critically thinking, and exploring as my time at Washington College progresses.
To Dwell in Possibility 