This semester has been one hell of a journey as a scholar and as a writer. For the final paper, I was tasked to answer this fundamental question,” What is the theory of writing?” As I sat lying down on my bed pondering this question. I quickly became very confused, I had too many thoughts running through my head and I took a minute to look back through this semester and bring together my core ideas. I came back to my most recent memory of deep writing as a source of inspiration. It was my philosophical final. I had to reread one of my old responses, polish the summary and explanation of the piece, and answer the questions I had asked about the piece when I first wrote it. Then it hit me! That’s what writing is all about. We start off initially with a small seed that represents your idea or claim or just something you want to research. Then we branch out on it, using various means to uncover more on the topic. Eventually, after writing the piece we come back to it, analyze it further, and fix the small nitty-gritty mistakes or anything that needs further polishing. As we polish our piece we can have a change of thought or discover something new, but in the end, we have a change in the final draft, to when we first started. This change cannot happen without reflection and one step in that direction is what leads us to this dilemma of constantly analyzing our work until we are not pulling any more hairs out and we are content with our piece.
The course which I had the most pleasure of writing this semester had to have been my philosophy course. The essay format is not your traditional informative piece or narrative. In these essays, it is best to write your intentions clearly first and not allude to your reader. There are no points in using extra figurative methods of explanation, it is best to explain the issue as clearly and concise as one can. But THAT is the hardest part of each piece I have written so far. It is hard to even get a grasp of the issue sometimes and even then to put it into words on a piece of paper is very hard, because by then you have to translate your message for the reader who you are trying to convey your message to.
In the first philosophical paper, we were tasked with answering this prompt: In Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates says: “Consider this: Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?” (10a) Explain the challenge Socrates is posing with this question. To what sort of account is Socrates here developing an objection? What, ultimately, is the objection? Try to explain the objection as straightforwardly as possible. I tried to first explain the Euthyphro dilemma and give context to the dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro. I crafted what I thought was a good “intro paragraph”.
I included context to their problem and even provided evidence from the original dialogue to strengthen my reasoning.
In conclusion, I tried to justify what Euthyphro’s concept of holiness and piety is in relation to what true piety is. I used evidence and showed that Euthyphro does not have a clear nature of what piety is. And in the end, there is no right answer to this question asked by Socrates. I thought I had a good conclusion, but I could have further expanded upon why this question is unanswerable. If I were to explain it some more I would add this bit. “Socrates clearly points out that humans have a good understanding of what it means to be pious and we should not depend on the god’s to determine piety as they are in conflict with one another and their conflicts are created because of their differences in virtues.” Overall the depth of understanding is not clear in this essay and I could have made it better, but this was sufficient in getting a pass since this was a pass or fail prompt. Still, I was notified later on with the inconsistencies and clarifications I needed to address within this essay by my teacher.
In my final essay for philosophy, I fixed up and expanded upon an old response and from first glance, I saw that the intro needed to be fixed. It was not clear enough. I had difficulty with expressing the message the author wanted to examine. Particularly I could not figure out what the author meant by this statement, “The view is that although we have strong reasons against animal cruelty, we lack strong reasons against painlessly killing animals in the prime of life;” I pondered for 15 mins and also consulted some of my friends because it was so hard to take away what the author was saying.
Having explained the issue was a good first step to polishing this response for the better. The original response was 1½ pages long. After polishing I got it to 3 pages without it being double spaced. I was amazed at how much more I could write having looked at it a second time. This second time around I even got to expand upon my own personal questions
This is what writing truly is, to take an idea, grow it, and make it better and better. Even after looking at the material a second time, I could still write much more and I have explained the issue a lot better than I could originally.
