Isabelle's Inquisitions

I think I grew a lot as a writer this semester. For one, I wrote a lot more compared to eleventh grade. However, I think what was more crucial to my development as a writer was that I viewed essays as more of an opportunity to explore the ideas floating around in my head as opposed to a way to practice how closely I can follow a certain structure (which was how I approached essay-writing last year, even though the year before I had not done so in tenth grade). Even though it wasn't fun to write essays last year because of this mindset, being able to go back to viewing essays as "fun" this year (as fun as writing essays can be) after feeling like it was something restrictive reaffirmed the importance of essay-writing for me as a way to deepen my personal understanding of a work beyond the understanding I had of it had I not had to create some kind of meaningful commentary on it under time pressure (which I think allows a lot of ideas I would've never considered come th

In her research paper “‘A Failure of the Imagination’? The Fiction vs. Nonfiction Debate,” Sophie Cunningham quotes Richard Ford in his statement of how “‘the realm of the imagination eludes readers more and more. In fact it irritates them. They want facts, and when they do read fiction they try and pin down the ‘real’ facts that underlie the novel.’” A phenomenon that has grown increasingly prevalent in recent years, Cunningham relates this observation back to her argument of how the push in the last decade to consume more nonfiction, at the expense of fiction, is a “failure of the wider, cultural imagination” and the societal emphasis on consuming work that directly benefit the reader by supplying them with applicable, real-world knowledge (this is common among readers of self-help books, for instance) — instead of stories that simply mindlessly entertain. I prescribed to this notion for much of middle school after I discovered that nonfiction was more than simply bullet-pointed fact