At the onset, when I thought about the idea of getting lost, I thought of it in literal terms, comparing it to getting lost on a road. However, in my journey as a writer, I moved past seeing things in such basic terms. I learned to lose traditional form and allow my thoughts to carry me into ideas beyond the surface, digging deeper than the original question and allowing my ideas to guide my writing. By doing so, I engaged more seriously with the issues I was writing about and I was able to do more interesting and thought-provoking writing.
In my work on my inquiry, this newfound appreciation of my own ideas in my writing and the willingness to engage more seriously is on display. In the paper, “A Tremendous Machine”, I moved from a rough draft that was very research-centric and methodical to a final draft that was much more thoughtful but also less structured. By letting go of mechanical structuring techniques like having three arguments for my point, I let my ideas lead my writing instead of a mechanical template. Through my honest consideration of the ideas at hand and interaction with sources, I was able to do some of my most compelling writing, thinking seriously about the issues I wrote about and digging deeper into my own thoughts on the issues at hand.
Moreover, originally, in my “To a Question” response to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Teach Yourself Italian,” I focused on Lahiri’s self-induced exile from the English language, but I failed to go deeper than this, spending most of my writing arguing how it wasn’t real exile because it was her choice. While it was a logical argument, I didn’t really introduce new, interesting ideas to the table, instead focusing on a surface-level thought. In my revision of this writing, I reconsidered what made Lahiri’s exile from English so impactful in learning Italian, thinking about the way Lahiri forced herself to be lost by not allowing herself to read English. Through this newfound thought, I was able to go further in connecting Lahiri’s exile with the greater idea of getting lost and its benefits, moving past the definition of the word exile and the struggle of language-learning.
Into the Abyss 