Metacognition: Ambiguity in Orlando

                Although I ended up being quite happy with the essay I just turned in for my English class, actually writing it ended up being extremely frustrating. Yes, I was frustrated that I even had to write an essay in the first place, but mostly, it boiled down to what I was actually able to write about that frustrated me most.

          

               Before I even started, I was very apprehensive about writing the essay. I was honestly not sure if I could find anything to write about. My subject, the use of ambiguity in Orlando by Virginia Woolf, wasn’t something I considered myself an expert on, and therefore I had no idea if I would find a good jumping off point to explore it. So at the beginning, my approach to essay-writing was just to wrap my head around my topic and discover all the different ways it appeared in the book, so that at least I would have examples to talk about. However, my topic ended up appearing much more that I thought it would. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it was easy to see all the ways that Woolf used ambiguity in her novel, and how interesting, clever, and purposeful each way was.

            At first this was great; I had gone from being completely confused about my topic (and really Orlando in general) to having countless examples of and reasons behind the use of ambiguity in Orlando. My essay started fleshing out immediately, and I was drawing conclusions about things that I had never even thought about before, for example the idea that writing ambiguously is actually more difficult than being straightforward in your writing. While at first I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to think about anything to write about, I now had more examples and ideas at hand than I could handle.

           There lies the problem.

  

          My essay was turning into a rambling, ten page long stream of consciousness rant about how interesting ambiguity is. And although Orlando was written in a very stream-of-consciousness way, writing my essay in the same format was not going to fly with my English teacher. In class, we had talked about the nature of essays, and how it was important to focus in on something very specific to talk about, lest you lose your reader entirely. Admittedly, this means being able to restrict your writing and even losing the opportunity to address an idea you might have wanted to explore. Doing these things would make your essay unfocussed, which would make it harder for you reader to follow your point. For example, if my topic was how ambiguity is a useful writing tool because it allows readers room to interpret ideas, I couldn’t really explore the idea of ambiguity being a difficult way to write, because it almost clashes with my topic. How confused would my readers be if I started by claiming ambiguity as a brilliant writing tool, and then turned around and called it a difficult way to write?

Thus began the tedious, headache-inducing, frustration-laden task of deciding what exactly the focus of my essay was going to be, and which ideas were going to be bounced from my essay. I was surprised by how much it bothered me to remove ideas from my essay. It almost felt like I was disowning them, even though I was extremely proud of them. Eventually I managed to whittle down my essay to what I thought were some of my strongest ideas that all stemmed directly from my topic. I realized that while yes, my essay was now much simpler, and that yes, it was missing some ideas that under better circumstances I would have included, my essay was now much more straightforward. After reading it over, it became very obvious how much stronger my ideas seemed now that there was such a strong focus throughout my essay.

What I’ve learned through this writing experience is that, even though it may be frustrating, it’s necessary to trim down your ideas in order to give your essay focus, because otherwise, all you have is a long list of ideas. By picking and choosing the ones that all follow one topic, you create one statement (a thesis statement) with several ideas behind it that act as support and really bring home your claim. As a bonus, the ideas you do choose to include all build off each other since they are connected to each other. The result of these things is a much more powerful piece of writing. I like that I’ve been able to come to terms with this a little, because it will make my next essay much less frustrating.

In the future, I will do things the same way I did with this essay: come up with as many interesting and significant ideas about my topic as possible, and then pick and choose the strongest and the most relevant to back up my thesis. This way, I don’t miss any ideas, but at the same time I don’t include every single one in my essay. However, I will be keeping in mind from now on the fact that I will have to say goodbye to a few of my ideas along the way.