This portfolio brings the central theme "turning to face the stranger." You will realize how I aimed to look at the stranger and make it familiar during your path through my works. It is often difficult to look at ourselves, at our place, at people around us and situations, with fresh eyes, with attention. In my essays/ narratives/ researches, this was my biggest challenge. To open my mind and see what I sometimes try unconsciously not to see or do not talk. It was indeed a big challenge, but it was crucial for my development as a writer. After these papers, I could realize how powerful creative writing is—learning how to think and organize my ideas made me evolve in writing and how I see and handle situations. By the end of my course, I realized that I could see and understand better when I put everything on paper.
Visual, aural, and verbal. I explored different media during my course. It is interesting working with various media because, depending on your task, showing a picture or audio might tell much more than an essay ever would. For me, it is essential to give this vision to the reader. It is necessary to show my work in different ways and make the reader feel what I feel. Besides the media, I have tried other writing styles as well. You will not find only formal essays but narratives in the Third Person Limited Point of View (POV) and researches. After exploring these different styles, I would say story-telling became my favorite. I did not have too much experience with it, but now I can see how powerful a story can be. It can awaken feelings and picture vivid situations transporting us to that very moment being described.
While writing my work through the semester, I could get more than only "writing knowledge." Writing these papers gave me another vision of the world and myself. I learned how to organize my thoughts and develop even more critical thinking. How to listen is also a necessary strength that I had to create. When we listen, we learn, and even when we lose an argument, we still learn. Learning how to listen and understand people's differences is a crucial strength to grow as a person, and this was something I developed during the last semester. With that knowledge, I found out what is to be "Out of the Cave." My inspiration for my title came from my favorite reading in this course, "The Allegory of the Cave" by Plato. Being out of the cave is to be aware of the world, realizing that what we see is not what only exists. It is to think. It is to open our minds and see more than ourselves. I tried to be out of the cave in every paper I wrote and see the situations with other eyes. I can say this is the biggest strength I got during my course. Among all the amazing things I learned, I chose "Out of the Cave" as my title because I believe this is the best way to describe what I absorbed during my path.