Thinking on Paper
Highlights
- Most books on writing assume that the sole aim of writing is communication. Communication is surely an important objective of writing but not the only one, nor the first. We take a differing view that the first goal of writing, like reading, is to understand; only then can one make that understanding available to others in writing.
- The idea is to learn to think in writing primarily for your own edification and then for the eyes of others. This approach will enable you to use writing to become more intelligible to yourself—to find your meaning—as well as to communicate effectively with others—to be found out.
- However, an even greater obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.
- Three propositions help to explain the complex relations among writing, thinking, and communicating. They are:
- Writing is a symbolic activity of meaning-making;
- Writing for others is a staged performance; and
- Writing is a tool of understanding as well as of communication.
Together these add up to the claim that writing is "thinking on paper" in which both writer and reader are witnesses to meaning-in-the-making, a meaning that the writer creates and the reader attempts to re-create.
- Symbols mediate not only communication but thought itself, and language is our most common symbolic tool to think with: silently, aloud, or in writing to ourselves or to others. Certainly we do not create the world with our symbols, but whatever the world comes to mean to us is literally a symbolic achievement. And the meanings we attach to things and events outside ourselves shape us in turn, including how we think, feel, act, and react. We grasp what our grasp of symbols enables us to grasp.
- Practically, this means that communication in writing is never perfect and seldom complete. Perfect communication in the sense of direct transmission of meaning from one mind to another (telepathy) never occurs in writing. Writing is always mediated thought, thought that is embodied in an intervening structure of language.
- You as a writer create a tapestry of linguistic symbols on paper that enable your reader to unravel your meaning as best he or she can. You cannot communicate your meaning except as you articulate it and your reader re-creates it via the medium of language. Of course, there are no guarantees that you will fully articulate your meaning or that your reader will fully grasp it. Success or failure can occur on either side
- The complete discipline of writing requires both uninhibited articulation and critical revision of one's first thoughts. Or, to put it another way, second thoughts on paper are edited thoughts for others eves
- But it is crucial for efficiency in the early stages of writing to be able to turn off your audience awareness, to separate writing for discovery from writing critically for presentation. This is because discovery and criticism are often mutually disruptive, originating in different mental attitudes and having different objectives.
- Putting articulation before communication also reminds us that whether thinking silently, aloud, or in writing, we do not so much send our thoughts in pursuit of words as use words to pursue our thoughts. Later, by revising the words that first snared our thoughts, we may succeed in capturing the understanding of others.
- Writing as communication also carries two further inhibiting suggestions: first, that thinking always precedes writing in two stages of thinking now and finding the “right” words later; and second, that "genuine" or "real" writing is the public, final expression rather than the personal instrument of thought. No better recipe for socalled writer's block could be devised, for it aggravates the worst of perfectionist tendencies to try to get everything right the first time.
- To conclude these preliminary remarks on the nature of writing: The practical importance of them to you as a writer is, first, to provide you with a coherent working conception of what it is to write; second, to outline the broad strategy of thinking in writing for yourself as well as for others; and third, to eliminate the most common misconceptions standing between you and the task itself. With this orientation in mind, you are ready to begin.
Thinking on Paper
Highlights
- Most books on writing assume that the sole aim of writing is communication. Communication is surely an important objective of writing but not the only one, nor the first. We take a differing view that the first goal of writing, like reading, is to understand; only then can one make that understanding available to others in writing.
- The idea is to learn to think in writing primarily for your own edification and then for the eyes of others. This approach will enable you to use writing to become more intelligible to yourself—to find your meaning—as well as to communicate effectively with others—to be found out.
- However, an even greater obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.
- Three propositions help to explain the complex relations among writing, thinking, and communicating. They are:
- Writing is a symbolic activity of meaning-making;
- Writing for others is a staged performance; and
- Writing is a tool of understanding as well as of communication.
Together these add up to the claim that writing is "thinking on paper" in which both writer and reader are witnesses to meaning-in-the-making, a meaning that the writer creates and the reader attempts to re-create.
- Symbols mediate not only communication but thought itself, and language is our most common symbolic tool to think with: silently, aloud, or in writing to ourselves or to others. Certainly we do not create the world with our symbols, but whatever the world comes to mean to us is literally a symbolic achievement. And the meanings we attach to things and events outside ourselves shape us in turn, including how we think, feel, act, and react. We grasp what our grasp of symbols enables us to grasp.
- Practically, this means that communication in writing is never perfect and seldom complete. Perfect communication in the sense of direct transmission of meaning from one mind to another (telepathy) never occurs in writing. Writing is always mediated thought, thought that is embodied in an intervening structure of language.
- You as a writer create a tapestry of linguistic symbols on paper that enable your reader to unravel your meaning as best he or she can. You cannot communicate your meaning except as you articulate it and your reader re-creates it via the medium of language. Of course, there are no guarantees that you will fully articulate your meaning or that your reader will fully grasp it. Success or failure can occur on either side
- The complete discipline of writing requires both uninhibited articulation and critical revision of one's first thoughts. Or, to put it another way, second thoughts on paper are edited thoughts for others eves
- But it is crucial for efficiency in the early stages of writing to be able to turn off your audience awareness, to separate writing for discovery from writing critically for presentation. This is because discovery and criticism are often mutually disruptive, originating in different mental attitudes and having different objectives.
- Putting articulation before communication also reminds us that whether thinking silently, aloud, or in writing, we do not so much send our thoughts in pursuit of words as use words to pursue our thoughts. Later, by revising the words that first snared our thoughts, we may succeed in capturing the understanding of others.
- Writing as communication also carries two further inhibiting suggestions: first, that thinking always precedes writing in two stages of thinking now and finding the “right” words later; and second, that "genuine" or "real" writing is the public, final expression rather than the personal instrument of thought. No better recipe for socalled writer's block could be devised, for it aggravates the worst of perfectionist tendencies to try to get everything right the first time.
- To conclude these preliminary remarks on the nature of writing: The practical importance of them to you as a writer is, first, to provide you with a coherent working conception of what it is to write; second, to outline the broad strategy of thinking in writing for yourself as well as for others; and third, to eliminate the most common misconceptions standing between you and the task itself. With this orientation in mind, you are ready to begin.