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                I am a stubborn writer, and I have been stuck in my ways for years.  What may be the most detrimental aspect of my stubbornness is that it is not necessarily bad writing or a bad style, I just cannot change it.  This means that for years I wrote the same paper over and over again with slightly different content, but I never really cared so long as my grades stayed at the same level.  Of course, there are worse things that can happen in writing, but it has left me in a state of stagnation; slowly sinking further and further into my patterns of words, paragraphs, and arguments.

                This class was too short to cure me of my stubborn tendencies and refusal to let go of my favorite style of writing, but it has, at the very least, given me an awareness of what makes this so poisonous to my intellectual and authorial growth.  Anne and I have discussed many of my papers in which binaries are a major offender.  I use them to paint an argument in black and white, eliminating the shades of grey that made the topic interesting in the first place.  Not only does the binary prevent a realistic expression of an idea, but it also limits me to debating back and forth between two ideas rather than expanding them in a different direction.  My writing process generates a similarly rigid and lackluster development of concepts.  I often begin by trying to create an outline to detail everything that the paper is supposed to say, but this leaves no room for further exploration.  The writing process should not constrain me to a single set of arguments and ideas, but rather open up a conversation with myself and our authors that expands upon the topic I originally introduced.  Both of these techniques are so ingrained in me that it is more than a semester’s worth of work to fix them, but by starting with a general awareness, I can slowly change these insidious methods.

                Though my papers often seemed to follow conventional arguments, I tried to challenge myself and others in class discussion.  Of course, this often led to me being critical for the sake of being contrary and simply refusing to believe anything any of the authors supported.  Criticality is something to be cultivated because it challenges me not to accept things at face value and to delve deeper into texts and arguments, but too much criticism is not always helpful.  I often ended up with fifty reasons why an author might be wrong, but very few positive supports of either my own or another writer’s opinions.

                Of course, before I sign off on my last piece of the semester, I want to address one of the biggest parts of the class: the city trips.  I will be the first to admit that I was not always the most enthusiastic.  Between working on Saturdays, rehearsing for a play, and finishing homework, there was a sizeable amount of grumbling about giving my carefully hoarded time for trips.  Nonetheless, I realize that these jaunts into the city gave me an academic excuse to escape from my academic commitments and spend at least part of my weekend relaxing.  They also provided me with an irreplaceable knowledge of the city and public transportation that will serve me for the rest of my time at Bryn Mawr.  They surprisingly also gave me an appreciation for the city despite the fact that before the semester, I held Philadelphia, Cincinnati (my home city), and others like them in nothing but disdain.

                So thank you to everyone in the class and farewell, at least until we see each other again next semester.