“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”

–    Joseph Campbell

Why is writing given such importance in today’s day and age where visual media is easy to create and share? Is it the emotions it evokes, the information it comprises or the language it represents? These questions have continuously intrigued me, but writing has been a cave that I haven’t actively pursued. That changed, in middle school when my Grade 6 English teacher, Ms. Anuradha introduced writing to me as a portal to express my emotions. From that point on, most of my writing journey involved fiction: short stories and poems, primarily. Academic writing was something that I did simply for the grade. When I enrolled for this writing class, I thought my experience was going to be like that from high school. Uninteresting topics and a lot of paraphrasing from different sources, but my experience with FIQWS were entirely different, it helped me rediscover academic writing and that is the journey this essay will be recording.

The first essay we wrote this semester was the literacy narrative. It was an exciting intersection of academic and story writing. As a first-time literacy narrative writer, it was challenging to navigate, I chose to explore my relationship with reading as it made the most dramatic impact in my relationship with literature. The reading we did for a class called “Always Living in Spanish; Recovering the Familiar, through Language” by Marjorie Agosin spoke to me on a personal level and really inspired my literacy narrative. The article talked about the author’s relationship with English as an immigrant, and the role of the writing in empowering her from a place of alienation. Born in India, raised in Dubai and living in New York, the feeling of alienation has been a lifelong struggle and being a bilingual child my relationship with English (like Agosin) has been a love-hate relationship. I wanted to address these issues in my essay. Combining these attributes, my final essay narrates the role literature played when I got my first period.

This essay’s rhetorical mode is narration which I think is justified using vivid imagery, description, and dialogue. The title and the first phrase “I remember the first time I got my periods” aspire to create a sense of suspense. The “I remember” phrase came about as a result of the journaling activity in class where we were to record our experiences with literature starting with “I remember.” I recorded a series of experiences but once I recorded this one I knew it was the most impactful in my journey. I wanted the title and the first phrase to act as a hook that left the audience intrigued, I also wanted it to be empowering while retaining simplicity. The essay’s purpose is to promote experimenting and belief in the power of literature to transform individuals. It is for an audience that has struggled as an outsider at any point in their life. Catering to the needs of a formal audience while narrating such a personal experience brought about some difficulty with the tone and style of writing. The essay is simple and precise to push the focus on the content and to tackle a subject that most people would hesitate to discuss. By sticking to a single memory and reciting the story in chronological order, I tried to make the narrative easy to follow I thought as experimenting was the center of the piece, talking about the works that pushed me out of my comfort zone was essential.

The draft was easy to produce as I knew which story I wanted to tell and how I wanted to say it, but I struggled with editing the essay and pushing it the extra mile.  I tried to edit by picking out loopholes and restructuring the story to fill them, by correcting grammatical errors and sentence structure. Before the final submission, we had a reading in The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook that introduced me to genres, style, stance, audience, and purpose. I broke down these terms for my essay which allowed me to have a more comprehensive analysis of it and I edited according to what I was trying to achieve and who I was trying to reach. The story could have delved more into the customs and traditions that are introduced as a backdrop to the narrative, but I was not sure how to do so without diverting the attention from the literary experience. This experience helped me identify myself in the literary world through rhetorical devices and unique elements, but it has scope for improvement. By starting off the semester on a bridge between the fictional and academic world of writing, it helped me appreciate academic writing while staying in a comfortable territory.

The next essay we wrote this semester was an exploratory essay. An exploratory essay is an interesting way for writers to learn ways to write objectively, a talent an aspiring journalist or individuals planning to pursue careers like it would benefit most from. When I had to select a topic, I chose the ‘Don Quixote Effect’ as I feel very passionate about realistic literature. We see knights in shining armors, charming princes and damsels in distress continuously alluded to. These character types are all idealizations introduced and influenced by the Don Quixote effect. Thus, leading to toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and other staggering issues in society. Ideals like ‘Men don’t cry’ and ‘Women are caretakers’, start harmlessly in romantic plots and go on to shape the society and what we perceive as the right way of conduct or gender norms. Literature influences society as much as society influences literature. This was the thesis I wanted to record through my essay. The 19th Century seemed like the perfect era to analyze the Don Quixote Effect, it was the Victorian Era- where the highest of high society operated, and societal standing, society’s perception of an individual and honor meant more than any other era. It was before the age of the movies and as the century that led up to the world war, it idealized war and love. The romantic movement was at its peak in the century which meant emotion & individualism was emphasized, the past, nature, love, and war were glorified. It was also in-line with the syllabus of the class. This topic allowed me to allude and compare to several texts which made the research and writing thoroughly exciting and interesting. Several allusions raised the need to actively ensure that the essay flowed seamlessly instead of jumping from topic to topic

The initial draft I produced was more subjective than I intended it to be, so I had to redraft the entire essay for its final version. In one of the journaling activities in class, we were asked to break down our essay as though we were explaining it to a child, this allowed me to look at my essay through a new lens and pick out the subjective nature of it at its tips. Apart from retaining objective content, an objective stance and style of writing were even more tough to achieve. I didn’t realize that many of the words that the first draft of my essay included had certain personal opinions attached to them. When this was pointed out by my professor, I knew I had a long way to go. I tried to avoid these mistakes by actively seeking out subjective phrases and words. This became a ‘hide and seek’-like game that I played with my essay, making it a challenging and interesting task to pursue. As the first step on my journey to objective writing, I tried to keep my writing precise and simple. The title follows this principle, it is direct and to the point, hopefully serving as a thesis statement. The essay is content rich. The two main case studies are ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Arms and the Man’ which are two books from the 19th Century that seemed to align with the Quixote effect most efficiently. The essay focuses on romantic relationships so both books are romantic to an extent. I only examined the Don Quixote effect with respect to romance as I thought it would be the easiest and most effective way this effect can be understood.

Citing with an MLA format was an entirely new puzzle and it was a truly educative experience. The MLA format was tough to tackle, confusing italics with quotation marks, forgetting to cite right after quotes and citing sources as per the format where all tough to keep up. I referred to OWL Purdue, took the advice of my peers and professors to handle MLA formatting. The entire process of this essay was on a much more difficult scale than its predecessor the literacy narrative, but it was an enriching experience. Looking at a subject in an objective manner helped me acquire so much more knowledge about it than I had anticipated. The option to work with any topic we were interested in, instead of being assigned topics like in high school motivated me to write this essay. This essay helped me get a clear perspective on what academic writing constituted of, it left me frustrated at points but on a whole, it was an enriching experience. I look forward to writing more such essays, in the years to come!

The final essay we wrote this semester was the critical analysis essay and I wanted to put in the best version of my writing for this essay and I believe I achieved my aim. The critical analysis essay was interesting to work with as it is a confluence of research, organization, and writing. I will reflect on how I fared on each of these subcategories. For my essay, I chose to work with the Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. This novella has very radical notions of love and marriage that piqued my interest and pushed me to explore them. Today, love between two people is the governing factor when it comes to marriage, cultural differences, financial and social standing have taken a back stand. Arranged marriages are still common in certain conservative cultures like India. My parents and their parents were arrange married, so I have seen the success of marriages that weren’t based on love but I wanted to see if this held true beyond the confinement of culture. One of the aspects that intrigued me about the Kreutzer Sonata was that it was banned during its time of release and reprinted a century later, I wanted to understand why it was so controversial. Leo Tolstoy is also an interesting author who I have always admired. His work War and Peace is one of the longest publications in the world but still makes for a compelling read and he is a significant influence on some of my role models like Mahatma Gandhi. The book is centered around marriage but for my research, I wanted to single out on what I saw as the most controversial stance, a stance against love marriages as love is often confused with lust. This thesis took a lot of research before I arrived at this iteration. The journaling session that recorded the process of building the thesis helped me arrive at this. After that experience, I also discussed my ideas with Professor Schmidt who facilitated the formation of the thesis. For the research, I used Jstor, Gale Literary archives and the CCNY Library databases primarily to try in different permutations and combinations of the topic, the author and the work. Finding the right sources was a difficult task and so was picking out quotes from the selected works. The library session with Professor Schmidt’s class helped me understand the nuances of research. Apart from picking papers that aligned closest to what I wanted to present, I looked into articles that analyzed Tolstoy as a person, his beliefs, his books and their relationship to the arts, comparison between the various books he wrote and Tolstoy’s marriage and love life to have a more holistic understanding of what he stood for. The annotated bibliography, for Professor Schmidt’s class, helped with this process, it helped me curate a list of sources that I could start off with.

`           The topic had a lot of directions in which it could travel in, it also had many premises that could be explored. Narrowing down which aspects to focus on, keeping them to the word limit, providing references for the same while organizing said information into a seamless flow was a herculean task. I spent a lot of time on reorganizing the draft for my final essay. The journaling activity where we recorded the difficulty of writing the essay helped me with redrafting my essay. I had a comprehensive understanding of my strengths and weaknesses. By redrafting I think my message was easier to comprehend and several of the loopholes that left readers who haven’t read the story confused have been rectified. A lot of my work didn’t have the right information backing my claims or my quotes were excessively long and didn’t add to the analysis of the essay. By identifying these flaws in the draft through Professor Cohl’s help, I was able to redraft my essay more efficiently. As for writing, I got carried away in summarizing the story instead of analyzing it and had to restructure my essay to fulfill its requirement for the final. I made a few punctuation errors, and formatting according to the MLA format is something I am still working on. The use of contractions has also been a tough task and I have actively sought for errors in this regard. I have referred to OWL Purdue and ensure that the citations and the paper adhere to the MLA format requirements and I have hopefully achieved it. Although the essay was the longest one we have written in this semester, it was one of the most interesting ones, it allowed me to look back and reflect on all that I have learned in this semester and achieve my endeavors as a writer through extensive research, coherent organization and professional writing. I think this essay helped me to get to the core of academic writing, I thoroughly enjoyed it! I got to work with a topic I was interested in which made the task more fun. I loved researching and compiling information from diverse sources, it elevated the experience. Combining this experience with my opinion, I believe I was able to create a story of sorts which drove me forward.

This semester helped me to get to the heart of writing through literary analysis, exploratory and critical analysis writing. The literary analysis helped me bridge fictional and academic writing, exploratory improved my objective writing skills while the critical analysis helped me showcase all the knowledge I acquired over the semester. By the end of the semester, I realized that the emotions writing evoke and the efficiency of the information it comprises is unparalleled by any other mode of communication, making it relevant now and forever.