Write Write?

Why Write? A Reconsideration

Young and Sullivan assert that certain types of thinking are impossible without writing. Honestly, their conclusions seem obvious. Their studies are interesting, but not earth shattering.

I can’t imagine a world without writing.
• I journal daily, and the process helps me sort out my thoughts, my emotions, my fears.
• I write down things I want to remember—quotes from books, songs I want to buy, writers I want to read, things I need to do.
• Taking notes helps me focus when I am listening to conversations or lectures. I don’t usually refer to the notes, but I remember things when I write them down.
• Writing in the margins of books and articles helps me find things I need to refer to later.
• I ask questions, make comments, and give myself instructions.
Really?
What proof?
I don’t think so.
What about xyz?
Check such and such a writer and see what he has to say.

I need writing to be me.

Not everyone would agree with Young and Sullivan.
Not everyone is compelled to write.

I find it ironic that Plato questions the value of recording thoughts in some kind of semi-permanent form His mentor, Socrates, wrote nothing, and if it weren’t for Plato, we probably wouldn’t even know Socrates’ name. Without writing, Plato himself would probably be anonymous. Instead, his questions, his theories, and his arguments are still with us.

But writing as a form of producing rhetoric was a new technology in Plato’s time, and there’s always a group of people resistant to new technologies—and change in general. Change brings about the unknown, and the unknown is . . . well, it’s unknown.

I wonder: Have we lost anything with the development of writing? Did this “invention . . . produce forgetfulness . . .”? Do we “seem to know many things” although we are actually “ignorant and hard to get along with . . .”?

A few hundred years later, Cicero asserted that is was the pen (writing) that was the best teacher for the art of speaking.

It would seem that Plato was wrong—or perhaps the way we learn has changed, and the new ways are not better or worse, but just different.
Young and Sullivan wrote this article in 1984, during a time when most of us were not using computers. I was still in college, producing all my papers on typewriters and longhand. I did all my research in libraries and took notes on paper. The world has changed in ways I don’t think they could ever have imagined, and I wonder what changes in our learning patterns have taken place over the last 25 years.

This, of course, isn’t the point of their article, but because they include certain predictions, it is worth asking: What has changed? What is changing? How have social networks, online journals, blogs, and other forms of writing affected the way we think? Do we think differently when we see the words come on a screen instead of on a sheet of paper?

I think we do, but does it matter? If so, how?