What comes to mind when you hear the metaphor from Sontag “Illness is the night-side of life”? Your interpretation of this statement may rely on what is for you  “nightside”. Even though it may seem evident that she was trying to refer to the illness as a bad side of life,  your interpretation is heavily influenced by your experiences.

When I started writing the outsider narrative, the process was quick. I gave my opinion and played around with the narrative reflecting my father’s experience from my point of view. It was easier for me to write this essay based on the questions provided by the professor. As a result, I developed the habit of first copying these questions and responding to each one of them before writing the essay directly. It gives me a clearer idea of what I was going to write. Since these stories were about each of my classmates’ individual experiences, I didn’t have to form an opinion about their writings when I read the outsider narrative for peer review. As a result, I truly enjoyed reading them.

I discovered that while I read the texts about metaphor, my ideas were more in line with what Susan Sontag was attempting to communicate about how “the wrong use of the metaphor” might destroy hope. It was simple to choose this book; the challenge lay in locating a text that expressed a different viewpoint. It was challenging for me to express how Lorde understood the metaphors because her writing contained thoughts that were unrelated to what I was thinking. Trying to walk in her shoes and understand the analogies through her experiences was challenging and gave me some writing block. Examining the essay examples provided was useful as it reflected the meaning of writing this metaphor essay. When we did the exercise of analyzing the metaphor of “not being part of a herd but part of a hive,” I realized misinterpreting comes with the different ways of analysis that each person has. Writing this essay and doing this exercise helped me develop my critical thinking skills because I was attempting to develop arguments by analyzing other people’s ideas, and help me to avoid the idea of analyzing things in a closed way. 

The process of writing the critical lens essay was complex, and it is difficult to read a text or write something without letting my own opinions get in the way. However, this, along with Carmela Price’s classes, has taught me the importance of not using my experiences to criticize other people’s opinions or the way they define their experiences. As a result, to write my essay through the eyes of another person, I had to first locate two texts by different authors, try to understand one of their opinions, and put myself in their shoes. I have worked hard to understand the position and point of view of the authors without letting my thoughts influence them. The professor gave a page with guidelines for writing a critical lens essay; this was the most useful resource primarily because I had these two questions. What major areas of agreement or disagreement do I notice between the two texts? What key points from the lens text can be applied to the target text? answering directly as I had done for the other essays gave me a clearer perspective on how to write the essay and analyze the texts I used.

For the research essay in addition to the main question that supports my thesis, I also wrote other questions because I find this to be the simplest and most effective method of writing. The process of writing my research essay was a changing process as I started out trying to find an answer to one idea but later discovered more information about another and I decided to change my thesis. Using other people’s work to support and answer my questions by this time was relatively simple because I had done before so during the prior essays. The exercise where you had to stand up and summarize the essay in a few sentences was the one that helped the most with this essay. I received useful feedback while discussing the research paper, and some classmates even assisted me in finding examples of earlier texts we had read in class that ideally had something to do with my essay.

During the course, I have learned that through the use of model questions, I can improve my compositional skills and sharpen my focus on the goal that each text should be aiming to achieve, and this is the new habit I use to write essays. Creating certain narratives such as metaphor essays or critical lens narratives has helped me to develop my critical thinking and expand it to be able to understand and analyze others without my thoughts influencing the way I interpret something.