“Good writing is good thinking made visible.” I was taught. As a technical editor, I’ve had many occasions to confront “subject matter experts” with their tangled prose only to discover, as we unravel it, that they had no idea what they were talking about either. The ones who have worked with me long enough to know I’m there to help them, have learned to admit up-front, “Yeah, I wasn’t really sure how that worked.” Then together we work to sort it out.
I know from experience that if I ask the right questions, I can trigger a revelation my writers’ brains. Suddenly it becomes clear to them and in turn we figure out how to make it clear to our readers.
Which Comes First: Writing or Thinking?
While some people might advise me to know what I’m going to say before I open my mouth, I’ve found that I don’t know what I think until I write it down. For me, writing is an act of inquiry, exploration, and discovery.
I learn best when I try to explain something to someone else. That’s when I see both the patterns and the missing pieces.
Inquiry and Genre: Writing to Learn in College
Recently I picked up this slim college textbook designed around a freshman writing class from the dollar table at Half Price Books.
In it there’s a chapter on how to be a more inquisitive and active reader. Here I was confronted with the realization that for most of my non-professional reading, I’m fairly lazy and undisciplined. After all, I rationalize, I’m off the clock. I’m reading for pleasure.
Yet, I know full well that if I don’t take the time to synthesize what I’ve read, then I might as well just have stared blankly at the ceiling because it’s as if I didn’t read it at all. The ideas flow through my brain as if it were a sieve. I must grasp and grapple with the ideas, if I’m to master them.
Nor is it enough to pull quotes (one of my favorite habits). I have to take that extra step of saying why I was struck by the thought.
The book provides four techniques for writing a response to reading.
- Identify your emotional response and then explore why it evoked that feeling.
- Most of us stop to report the emotion but never examine or analyze it.
- Summarize the text.
- Can you convey the key points to a third party?
- Paraphrase the text.
- This is what I do most often do in my professional work. I can’t understand something unless I rewrite it.
- Question the text.
- What underlying questions does it answer? Do you agree or disagree with the answers the author provides? Does the author frame the argument in a way to lead you to a conclusion you might not otherwise make? What is the author’s motivation for writing this particular piece?
The Questing and Questioning Mind
I think the beauty of the human mind stems from its inquisitiveness. Curious. Searching. Observing. Examining. Analyzing. Synthesizing. And finally, most importantly, creating.
We characterize curiosity as childlike because by the time most of us reach adulthood it has been drummed into us not to ask too many questions, or ask the wrong questions of the wrong people.
Don’t believe it. Inquisitiveness is our birthright. Keep asking questions.
GPlus Discussion
Experimenting with different formatting. Which is easier?
Jul 12, 2015
George Station
+1
You hit one of my main traps, the casual read with quotes pulled out and saved, never to be seen again, unless it’s time for a pithy update to my rotating e-mail sig line.
My low-pressure “cure” for this is the active G+ or Facebook conversation that forces me to think about what was important in a piece of writing, what others thought was important, and why there might be a difference. The “old-school” way of cutting off outside-world contact with just me and the manual typewriter or tablet of foolscap (2015 keyboard equivalent, ha ha) doesn’t happen much these days.
Jul 12, 2015
Peter Strempel
Does the book talk about ‘fuck you’ writing?
Jul 12, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+George Station I’m so glad you commented because you recently wrote about (if I remember correctly) an article on note-taking and it was one of several things that prompted me to review my poor study habits.
Jul 12, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+1
+Peter Strempel Not as such…although that might fall under the heading of “examining an affective response”.
Jul 12, 2015
Peter Strempel
Affective response? Doesn’t sound nearly as good as ‘fuck you’. Maybe it’s under the section dealing with effective language?
Jul 12, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+2
+Peter Strempel I can barely suppress a smile because, of course, it’s you who have so often admonished me “Before you put pen to paper. Think!” And I who so petulantly respond, “I can’t think unless I put pen to paper.” It’s taken me more than three years to fashion this response and now that I reread it, I see how I strayed down this path and that, still struggling over conflicting ideas, still trying to decide what was the thing I most wanted to impress in whoever read it.
The book helped me by identifying several possible ways we can respond to what we read. I found this freeing because I often feel so intimidated by the task of writing a polished critical piece that I don’t begin at all. (+Cass Morrison mentioned this same problem in her reshare). But now I understand it’s permissible to write a shorter, less formal response. If I can’t explore underlying questions, I can paraphrase. Or if I can’t think of how I could say it differently (a problem I have when I read good writers…I’m in awe of their phrasing), then I can at least summarize. If not that, then I can try to explain how I reacted to it and think about why I reacted that way.
Any response is a beginning, as long as I take a moment to jot it down.(Luckily, I have a Jotter!)
Jul 12, 2015
Peter Strempel
You just like to tweak my nose, don’t you?
Jul 12, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+Peter Strempel Yes.