This is the end, beautiful friend, the end.

It has always been difficult for me to write endings. How do I bring closure to all of the thoughts I have just unleashed? How do I contrive to bring everything together in a way that is concise, powerful, conclusive, thought-provoking, memorable, and whatever else a conclusion should be? The best way to end this class, I believe, will be to look back on what it has come to mean to me.

There was a time, back when I had "free time", before high school and college and leadership positions and jobs happened to me, when I imagined being a writer. Learning to write, to express ideas in any style and context, could be learned, I felt, by study of vocabulary, grammar, forms of writing, from traditional to unconventional, and clever writers' works. The art, the creativity, the mark of a true writer, I felt, lay in the ideas themselves. Real writers, I imagined, have piles, stacks and heaps of these in their cluttered studios, entire novels diagrammed out, character names scribbled on the nearest scrap at hand, or plot twists imagined in the middle of the night.

There was a time when I felt like a writer. Or, really, I felt that I was moving in the right direction. I was building vocabulary, learning about styles, and, most importantly, accumulating ideas. This class has let me recapture that. Again, I have collections of scribbled ideas, scraps of inspiration everywhere, found in pockets, backpacks littering my desk and hastily saved to my laptop.

It takes a real effort, but this class has proved to me that despite the school and the work, writing can cram into the demands on my time. It's amazing what a strict deadline (and sleep deprivation) may produce from those small pieces of inspiration that I save. This semester is my reminder to keep collecting them.

Can language completely capture experience?

As much as I hate to say what has already been said, as much as I love to play 'devil's advocate' or to point out alternative views, I must agree with everyone and affirm that words cannot fully capture experience.

As powerful as words are, allowing us to communicate and express ideas, they are only symbols, given their power by association with experience. That which we call a rose, as Juliet reminds us, is only represented by an arbitrary sound, which we mutually agree refers to that particular flower.

Simile, metaphor and analogy are effective and widely-used language tools which function by comparison to that which is familiar. When Douglas Adams wrote, "The ship hung in the air in exactly the same way that a brick doesn't", he expected us to recognize the word 'brick' as refering to the heavy, solid piece of something like clay or stone with the distinct characteristic of not floating above the ground.

The long and short of it is that language is a representation, a symbol, and a substitution when there is no alternative; experience is unique, so some means of sharing such a thing, however imperfect, is still infinitely useful.

Good-bye Small World

After all, I feel learning different writing tactics is not just about developing writing skills. The writing for me was learning about myself, and everything we learned through this course helped me to know about myself better.



“Language is the mirror that captures the reflection of one’s thought” – Every pieces of your work will remind you of whom you are.



Before taking this class, writing for me was just painful but nothing else. Through this course, I have realized that writing is a space where I can freely and truly express myself, and Christine taught me how important it is to enjoy writing in order to become a good writer. An unenthusiastic attitude towards writing only produces valueless crafts, and I think this is why I was never a good writer before. This course gave me a broader insight into the values and true meanings of writing.




“I was trained to become a strategist at Meiklejohn 103”



In Meiklejohn 103, I was trained to become a skilled strategist. I had to learn how to use the instruments (tactics) and how to construct my thoughths (applying tactics). There is no end for the development of my skills as a writer, but this training was successful.








Good-bye small world and good-bye everybody who shared this space with me.

Language and The Enormity of Experience

When I tried to gather my thoughts to answer this question, I paused several times recalling the time when I had a hard time to explain my experiences. Then, I came to realize that there were not many times that I succeeded in converting the ideas in my mind about the experience into actual language. In most cases, I failed to do so. Then, I started thinking about what are the reasons behind it. Also, I am interested in to what extent this happens to other people.

Personally, I think that it is quite difficult to describe something visually in terms of a language. There was an experience that I was asked by my mother to describe the painting I saw at a museum. When I saw the painting, what I saw was a feeling. I saw the painting, and I just felt it. It was not something like “it portrays the beauty of nature” or “ it portrays the human misery” It was all about feelings. There were so many things that I could not explain in words, because by seeing the painting I experienced so many emotions tangled up which simultaneously converted into one form of an unexplainable feeling. It is possible that some people could explain this better than me due to their experience with art. However, I believe that there is a limit in language to describe experiences in details. Especially when the experience involves a feeling, I would say that language most likely fails to capture the complexities of that unique experience.

While the kind of experience I stated above is very difficult to describe in words, there are some experiences that you can easily interpret in words. Nevertheless, I often fail to do so in both cases. At least for me, one of the reasons why I often end up failing to capture the enormity of experience is attributed to my bad linguistic skills. This has been true for me for so many years even in my mother language, Japanese. I assume that this is because I was less exposed to reading books from a young age simply because I did not like it. Therefore, when I want to verbalize what I experience or what I felt, I face the difficulties of explaining it in words. I easily get frustrated when I cannot come up with perfect words that I am looking for in order to represent my emotional orientation or physical experience. Then, what I always think is that people with enriched linguistic skills might not have the same problems as I have. There is no end in learning a language, and this is true even if it is your mother language. I believe that language can be improved or cultivated through practices just like playing an instrument. Some people can play a violin professionally where some only can play it as a novice. What I want to say here is one’s ability to describe the complexities of the experience in language inherently depends on the practices one had in language. However, even after gaining great linguistic skills, it is still difficult or impossible for language to capture the enormity of experience.

I believe that only practicing a language cannot make one fully capable of expressing their experiences. I believe that fully developed logical thinking and cognitive processes are indispensable for one to achieve the purpose of expressing the complexities of experience in language. When we want to perfectly describe our experiences in language, we think about where we should begin to talk, where we should emphasis on, which part of your story is most important, which words we should put to explain and what is the most effective way to express it. When you verbalize or write your experience, you are going through these processes in your mind naturally and intuitively. These are just examples, so there should be more things to be pointed out. Nevertheless, these things are just crossing your head. I assume that a person who can do this process very quickly and effectively maintaining their logical thinking could be the one who is relatively better in describing the complexities of experience in language.

I do not say that language fully captures the complexities of experiences because the experiences we have are too complicated to describe in words. Describing what you experienced by listening music, watching opera or seeing a painting could be the example for this explanation. I suggested some of my ideas that possibly can improve people’s ability in describing the enormity of experience in words. However, I sill put emphasis on the fact that there is always limits to achieve it.

Bye!

Through my four years at UW I have taken many classes, but nothing that can match the relaxed atmosphere of ILS 200. I have enjoyed going to class and having a true discussion, unlike most other classes here.

I feel I have actually learned something of use no matter what job I end up in after graduation, which is something I don't think I can say about any other class.

In closing I would like to thank Christine as well as my classmates for making my time there enjoyable and informative.

The Enormity of Language

I do not believe that language can capture the enormity of experience because experience takes five senses to absorb and language cannot recreate the five senses accurately. For example, nobody can know exactly what its like what to stand on top of Mount Everest by listening or reading someone's story about it. If language could capture experience perfectly then what would be the point in traveling the world and seeing all it has to offer.

Language does give a close approximation of experience, but it can not recreate the entire feeling. Language is the best approximation we have though, without being able to actually experience certain things listening to someone tell a story about their personal experience is fun. The excitement in a person's voice as the tell their favorite story about what they have done in their life is great, but nothing can recreate the feeling of walking through completely abandoned castles in Ireland.

Although language is the closest thing we have to experiencing what other people have, nothing can recreate the feeling of experiencing life.

Au Revoir, Bon Voyage, Ciao, and other cacozelia...

Farewell to Small World, Christine, and whoever else had the time and courtesy to listen to my run-on sentences. I truly feel as though I have grown, not just as a writer, but as a thinker. I hope my writing will continue to be more intentional in all rhetorical aspects, however, I may have to look up some figures and schemes every now and then to help me out. Let it be known, I am not a literature, political science, history, or rhetoric major, but a biochemist with a keyboard and a passion for understanding the complexity of writing and language. Thank you for allowing me to fulfill this passion, it has been one (expletive) of a semester :)