Fall 2023 Post 07: The Most Important Thing about Writing

Of course, writing classes have to cover lots of issues, but if I had to choose just one issue that every writing class should deal with, then I would choose conversation. I wish every writing student could see how writing is a conversation, first with ideas, then with people, and now with AI such as Bard.

My 40-years of teaching writing in college have convinced me that too many students write poorly because they are not writing to anybody about anything — at least, not about anything important to them. Rather, they are simply filling up paper with 500 or 1,000 words to complete an assignment that they prefer not to do. They are not really engaging with ideas and people. Consequently, they say not much to nobody, which results in empty, vapid papers, which we teachers then have to read and grade. It's enough to drive a teacher to drink, or suicide.

Now, this may sound like an attack on students, but it isn't. I don't blame students – well, not completely. Students are quite willing to write, especially today. All my current students write every day in countless texts, Facebook posts, and tweets, and they write all that stuff because they instinctively like to engage in conversation. It's what humans do. Everyday, all of us engage in a few conversations intensely (say, conversations about fashion, sports, politics, romance, or religion with our friends or family), and we engage in many other conversations more casually. Today's students are already writing more than at any other time in history. According to a 2016 article on the website Text Request, "In June of 2014, 561 billion text messages were sent worldwide. That’s the most recent number we’ve got. Obviously that’s a rounded figure, but it brings us to roughly 18.7 billion texts sent every day around the world." That adds up to about 7 trillion text messages a year. That is a hell of a lot of writing about nearly everything you can imagine. This generation is producing more writing per year than in all of previous human history combined, and they are doing it because they want to. No doubt about it. All students are writers already, and they like it.

So why don't most students like academic writing? I think it's mostly because they don't see academic writing as a conversation about engaging topics with interesting, engaging people. Too many students don't particularly want to  talk to their professors about anthropology, botany, or zoology given that they think their profs are old, boring people and their subjects are even more boring and irrelevant to the degree they are pursuing.

Unfortunately, too few college writing courses confront this issue. We writing teachers should teach students strategies for turning any class writing assignment (from algebra to zoology) into an interesting, worthwhile conversation. In her presentation "Writing Is a Conversation," writing instructor Johannah Rodgers says that treating writing assignments as conversation has numerous benefits for students. First, it increases student's confidence in their writing, and then it makes the connections between the written conversations student already have in their social spaces with the academic conversations they engage in college. This can make for better writing and higher grades for students and better reading for teachers. That's a win-win.

So how do you go about framing your academic documents as a conversation? I'm glad you asked.

First, it would really help if professors would make better assignments that emphasized the conversational aspect of writing academic documents. It's why professors write their own academic documents: first to engage their professional subject matter (they want to learn more about botany, for instance) and then to engage their peers (they want to show off to the scientific community what they've learned about how trees communicate). Let's break this down using this blog post that I'm writing and you are reading.

In this post, I'm writing about writing because writing is my long-time professional interest. I've been studying composition, rhetoric, and literature since graduate school back in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the University of Miami. I've put in the effort because I find this topic rich and rewarding. I've thought long and hard about rhetoric and poetic, and I have a few things to say about them. And the more I have learned, the more I learn that there is to learn. Learning begets learning.

Of course, most of you do not share my interest in and enthusiasm for writing and literature. For too many of you, courses in composition and literature are just annoying hurdles you have to jump on your way to a career in nursing, or computers, or business. 

Fair enough. 

But this attitude doesn't really help you through this class, and it ignores the reality of a college education. You have signed up for a four-year college degree, which means that you are committed to both a specific major AND a broad understanding of human knowledge. The broad understanding supports the more narrow skills and abilities you learn in your major: nursing, information technology, or business, for instance. A bachelor's degree implies that you not only have learned how to take a person's temperature and draw their blood, but you can also read a medical chart, listen and speak intelligently to scared patients, write down clear, intelligible instructions and comments for a too-busy physician, and use numbers to track the rise and fall of a critical patient's blood pressure. You will have not only the narrow skills that make you a competent nurse, but you will have the broader understanding that helps you recognize, fit into, and work with a wide range of professionals in a modern, complex medical environment. You will have a broader intellectual base that will position you to learn more as you progress in your career. You don't get that broad understanding with narrow, technical training. You get that with a broader college education. Developing a deeper appreciation for that kind of broad, liberal arts education will seriously help you get through college.

So the biggest benefit of college is learning to learn — to learn anything. And you don't know what will benefit you. In his article "A Tribute to a Great Artist: Steve Jobs" in the Smithsonian Magazine, Henry Adams tells a story about how Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, was greatly influenced by a class in Chinese calligraphy that he took at Reed College before he became a computer entrepreneur. His innate interests in life and his eventual career focused on technology, and perhaps no one — not even Steve Jobs himself — could see how an artsy-fartsy class in Chinese calligraphy could help him pursue a career in technology, but it did. It helped Jobs re-envision the personal computer with the graphical user interface that changed everything. Then that artistic sensibility helped him later when he founded Pixar, the animation company that he eventually sold to Disney for billions of dollars. If you want to succeed, you need an intense focus (your major) supported by a broad and insatiable curiosity about everything (your liberal education). You need both a wide view and a narrow view. As Iain McGilchrist explains in his marvelous book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), you must use your whole brain: scan the big picture with your right brain and focus on details with your left brain. You must do both. Remember: the world is complex, and everything is connected to everything else. The details don't make sense without the big picture, and there is no big picture without the details. Both are required.

And written and spoken languages are among the most beneficial tools you have for learning most everything intellectual. Language is the tool of choice in college. If you can't read it, you probably can't learn it. If you can't write it down, you probably don't know it. If you don't know it, then you probably can't succeed in class. You must be able to read and write, listen and speak. All are necessary.

Then, you must learn to converse with people about what you know and what you want to know. I'm writing to you now because I want you to understand some things that I've learned over my 50 years of studying writing and doing writing. I think you will succeed better in my class if you understand how to engage the class, and if you succeed, then I succeed. I will have a better time, and so will you.

So learn to engage the material first so that you can learn something, and then learn to engage your audience so that you can help extend that knowledge to others. Talk to each other about something important. That's basically it, and that's basically the most important thing about writing.

So leave me a comment about writing as a conversation. Does that metaphor make sense to you? Does it change the way you think about academic writing? Converse with me. Converse with your colleagues. Converse with the material you are reading.

Teaching moment:

Have you noticed how I have integrated outside, secondary sources into my own writing? You should notice. Most academic writing expects authoritative support for any claim you make, so when I claim that people today are writing more than at any other time in history, then I support it with hard research – either my own, or more often, that of other authoritative scholars. And when I claim that Steve Jobs benefitted from a college class in Chinese calligraphy, I support my claim with a superbly researched article in the Smithsonian, a recognized, authoritative journal. After all, I didn't know Steve Jobs firsthand, and I've never been to Reed College where he took that class. If I want my claims to be believable, then I should support them with authoritative evidence. You should do likewise in your own academic writing. Save your unsupported claims for arguments at your local bar. Few people there care about sources.