Talking is natural. Writing is not. (Verlyn Klinkenborg)
As soon as I started preparing a seminar on writing for a group of undergraduates studying music and sound, I noticed that I almost knew too much about my subject: in recent years I have become intrigued not just by writing itself but by the whole context around it. For example: the interplay between writing and conversation; the influence of communication technologies on human society; and the uses of narrative writing in education and at work. As some of my readers know, I work as a writing coach and I even focused my thesis on how people use writing in organisations...
The students are in their first year at university and have an essay deadline looming, and we will only have two hours together, so I wanted to come up with a seminar that is pitched at the right level and includes plenty of useful learning activities. On this occasion, therefore, I wanted to set aside my specialised interests and focus on some of the “essentials” of essay writing.
The next thing I noticed was that my preparation process was a long and winding one: I thought about the seminar on walks, in the shower and while sitting on trains; I had conversations about it; I drew mindmaps; I looked at relevant documents; I made a provisional plan; I let the ideas simmer overnight; I went back over the plan; and then I had the idea of writing a blog post about it. The whole exercise left me wondering whether I am one of those people who, in the words of French essayist Michel de Montaigne, feel compelled to go in for “tedious and elaborate meditation” when preparing a talk or sermon!
Eventually, thank goodness, I was ready to jettison less relevant stuff and settle on what I think are the most essential skills needed to write good essays:
(1) Organising one’s thinking – I want to help the students work out how to structure their argument, given that their 2000-word essay is supposed to feature one case study (e.g. a musical work) and they have been told to: (i) describe the work; (ii) analyse the medium; (iii) contextualise the work; and (iv) interpret it.
(2) Writing good sentences – for less experienced writers, this includes stripping out every unnecessary word, using active verbs, breaking down long, unwieldy sentences into shorter ones, and revising drafts meticulously.
(3) Liberating one’s creative thinking – with the help of activities such as conversation (e.g. talking to a fellow student) and “freewriting” (taking pen and paper and spending a few minutes handwriting whatever comes to mind on a particular subject without stopping or erasing anything).
The first two skills (structure and sentence-writing) may seem obvious ones to learn, but I think the third one is often underrated.
After I had settled on these three, I started to wonder what my overarching idea might be, if indeed there is one. Perhaps it is simply that essay writing takes time and effort – you can’t just dash it off at the last minute. Indeed, a good essay usually requires revisiting the draft again and again (some call this “iterative” writing). "All writing is revision, claims Verlyn Klinkenborg in his exquisite book, Several Short Sentences About Writing:
A writer may write painstakingly,
Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic,
Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years.
And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow.
(Verlyn Klinkenborg)
(I’ll leave you guessing how many times I revised this blog post before plucking up courage to press “Publish”.)
If this all sounds like too much hard work, it is – many people find writing arduous and painful. I suspect this is partly because human beings are first and foremost talking animals – as a species, we started to speak many, many thousands of years before we invented writing. Without writing, our oral ancestors were limited to talking to each other and telling stories from memory. They certainly couldn’t “look things up” in books or on the internet and they had no way of developing complex, abstract arguments.
I have noticed that being good at writing is a great advantage in life. Yes, it’s a bit of a slog, but it can also be satisfying and mind-expanding... maybe precisely because it involves such a rich mix of analytical and creative thinking.
Postscript
It was great fun working with the students last week. One noticed that having a conversation with somebody about their essay subject made them feel enthusiastic about it. And as for the freewriting, they didn't seem to want to stop, even though one student said he didn't like his own handwriting.
An acknowledgement
Although I had tried out freewriting (AKA automatic writing) myself some time ago, it was Gilly Smith who helped me see its true value by introducing me to "dreamwriting".
Related reading
Michel de Montaigne: Essays, Book 1 Ch X, Of Quick or Slow Speech (1580).
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946).
Verlyn Klinkenborg: Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012).
As soon as I started preparing a seminar on writing for a group of undergraduates studying music and sound, I noticed that I almost knew too much about my subject: in recent years I have become intrigued not just by writing itself but by the whole context around it. For example: the interplay between writing and conversation; the influence of communication technologies on human society; and the uses of narrative writing in education and at work. As some of my readers know, I work as a writing coach and I even focused my thesis on how people use writing in organisations...
The students are in their first year at university and have an essay deadline looming, and we will only have two hours together, so I wanted to come up with a seminar that is pitched at the right level and includes plenty of useful learning activities. On this occasion, therefore, I wanted to set aside my specialised interests and focus on some of the “essentials” of essay writing.
The next thing I noticed was that my preparation process was a long and winding one: I thought about the seminar on walks, in the shower and while sitting on trains; I had conversations about it; I drew mindmaps; I looked at relevant documents; I made a provisional plan; I let the ideas simmer overnight; I went back over the plan; and then I had the idea of writing a blog post about it. The whole exercise left me wondering whether I am one of those people who, in the words of French essayist Michel de Montaigne, feel compelled to go in for “tedious and elaborate meditation” when preparing a talk or sermon!
Eventually, thank goodness, I was ready to jettison less relevant stuff and settle on what I think are the most essential skills needed to write good essays:
(1) Organising one’s thinking – I want to help the students work out how to structure their argument, given that their 2000-word essay is supposed to feature one case study (e.g. a musical work) and they have been told to: (i) describe the work; (ii) analyse the medium; (iii) contextualise the work; and (iv) interpret it.
(2) Writing good sentences – for less experienced writers, this includes stripping out every unnecessary word, using active verbs, breaking down long, unwieldy sentences into shorter ones, and revising drafts meticulously.
(3) Liberating one’s creative thinking – with the help of activities such as conversation (e.g. talking to a fellow student) and “freewriting” (taking pen and paper and spending a few minutes handwriting whatever comes to mind on a particular subject without stopping or erasing anything).
The first two skills (structure and sentence-writing) may seem obvious ones to learn, but I think the third one is often underrated.
After I had settled on these three, I started to wonder what my overarching idea might be, if indeed there is one. Perhaps it is simply that essay writing takes time and effort – you can’t just dash it off at the last minute. Indeed, a good essay usually requires revisiting the draft again and again (some call this “iterative” writing). "All writing is revision, claims Verlyn Klinkenborg in his exquisite book, Several Short Sentences About Writing:
A writer may write painstakingly,
Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic,
Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years.
And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow.
(Verlyn Klinkenborg)
(I’ll leave you guessing how many times I revised this blog post before plucking up courage to press “Publish”.)
If this all sounds like too much hard work, it is – many people find writing arduous and painful. I suspect this is partly because human beings are first and foremost talking animals – as a species, we started to speak many, many thousands of years before we invented writing. Without writing, our oral ancestors were limited to talking to each other and telling stories from memory. They certainly couldn’t “look things up” in books or on the internet and they had no way of developing complex, abstract arguments.
I have noticed that being good at writing is a great advantage in life. Yes, it’s a bit of a slog, but it can also be satisfying and mind-expanding... maybe precisely because it involves such a rich mix of analytical and creative thinking.
Postscript
It was great fun working with the students last week. One noticed that having a conversation with somebody about their essay subject made them feel enthusiastic about it. And as for the freewriting, they didn't seem to want to stop, even though one student said he didn't like his own handwriting.
An acknowledgement
Although I had tried out freewriting (AKA automatic writing) myself some time ago, it was Gilly Smith who helped me see its true value by introducing me to "dreamwriting".
Related reading
Michel de Montaigne: Essays, Book 1 Ch X, Of Quick or Slow Speech (1580).
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946).
Verlyn Klinkenborg: Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012).
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