Writing To Learn
Format: 📖 Book
Overall impression:
This is one of those books that you can get the value from the title but the reiteration and stories throughout is valuable.
Notes
I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another-by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document—a letter, for instance-had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.
Finally, in the national furor over “why Johnny can’t write,” let’s not forget to ask why Johnny also can’t learn. The two are connected. Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn. Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape. Whatever we write—a memo, a letter, a note to the baby-sitter—all of us know this moment of finding out what we really want to say by trying in writing to say it.
They can tell us as much as we want to know. Probably no subject is too hard if people take the trouble to think and write and read clearly. Maybe, in fact, it’s time to redefine the “three R’s”-they should be reading, ‘riting and reasoning. Together they add up to learning. It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means. Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back.
Where does writing figure in all this? Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism-pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor-for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.” It’s a useful piece of information.