The Importance of Thinking

Growing up, writing was never really my strong suit. Most of the writing I had done was very robotic and followed very strict guidelines, where things were just plugged into a memorized structure. I was taught to write in this way so that I would perform well on standardized tests, so my writing became very standardized. As a result, most of the writing I did was done under a time limit, in order to mimic testing conditions. I would receive a prompt minutes before actually beginning to write, and I would think about how to plug information into the structure I was taught over and over again. As a result of this teaching, I was never really taught any conventional grammar rules either, mostly because there were no points taken off for punctuation mistakes. I was never really taught about the MLA or APA guidelines either because most of the writing was based on passages that we had to read minutes before writing. Looking back, I think that I really disliked writing because of this teaching style.

Before the semester started, I didn’t really know what to think about having to take a writing class. I originally thought we would just have in class essays in response to what we were doing in the other section of the class, but I was happy to find out that this wasn’t the case. The assignments given in class where the ones I had hoped to receive in high school, where I would have to really think about the work I was doing before actually writing. This was really apparent within the metaphor essay. The Metaphor essay was were I was really allowed to think and analyze in a time frame that wasn’t extremely rushed or forced. I knew that I wanted to use a metaphor that I was already very familiar with, so I would be able to spend more time figuring out how to write the actual essay as opposed to spending more time on the metaphors. 

My brainstorming processes for this essay and for many of the other ones was to look back at my old notes from high school. This is where I thought about Slaughterhouse 5, and I knew this book would be a perfect match with the military metaphors that Sontag had used. Since I already had done work with Slaughterhouse 5 I could really focus on diving deep and bringing out real thought and analysis with the infamous “So it goes” metaphor. It was in a peer review session where everything had really clicked. Someone in my group had given me a lot to think about. If “So it Goes” brings about this idea that death is pointless, then what is really being said about life. It was at that moment I really appreciated the peer review groups. This idea really became a big part of my analysis in my essay. 

If everyone were to view death as just another occurrence, life would lose all meaning because if death is inevitable, then all of life meaningless. As a result, people would have no real motivation to strive and continue. This nihilistic point of view portrayed by the metaphor clearly obscures the meanings of life and death. The joy, pain, and loss that is experienced through life and death is completely undercut by “so it goes”(Mathew 4).

This piece of writing was a direct result of the good conversations that arose in the peer review discussions. I was really able to think about what I was writing and I felt very good about what came out of it. When writing about Slaughterhouse 5 in class, I was never really given the time to really sit with and comprehend the ideas Kurt Vonnegut wrote about, but now that I had time to really ponder on his words, I could bring forth really rich analysis. I could really see what Vonnegut’s purpose was in saying “So it Goes”, and the implications that this type of thinking brings.

I had a very similar process with the research paper, where I had tried to think about work I had done in the past to give me some basis. The Tim O’Brien quote, “Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war” is what really pushed me towards my topic on Vietnam War veterans (O’Brien 58). I was left wondering why a veteran would be so anti-war. What had set Tim O’Brien to feel like he was a coward instead of a war hero? Exploring and thinking about these questions is what really allowed for to begin researching for my essay. After researching about the war, and what the men fighting were going through and the times that they grew up in I was able to reach a conclusion within my essay. 

Vietnam had clearly changed America’s relationship with war and with its soldiers. The boys who had listened to their father’s amazing war stories had grown up to become men ridiculed for going to war…[b]ecause their war did not have a clear enemy who just needed to be defeated, people were confused as to who the soldiers were fighting (Mathew 7).

I realized that I was able to reach this conclusion after having spent time really thinking and pondering on the texts and research that was available. A lot of brainstorming was done to make sure I knew what type of sources to look for and quote from. The peer review conversations had helped me to really plan my essay, so that anyone regardless of their background knowledge could read the essay, and it helped me focus my ideas around the treatment of the soldiers themselves.  

Writing is ultimately the product of great thinking and analysis. The authors of Slaughterhouse 5 and The Things They Carried were able to create these work after asking and thinking about important questions. I was really only able to see progress in my writing after really thinking about what I was going to write, and talking with other people about how to improve my drafts. The thought and discussion that go into brainstorming and peer reviewing are really what allows for great writing to be produced.