Quotes Tagged: thinking
[W]e write to find out what we know and what we want to say.
I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document—a letter, for instance—had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn. Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape. Whatever we write—a memo, a letter, a note to the baby-sitter—all of us know this moment of finding out what we really want to say by trying in writing to say it.
It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means. Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back.
What we study, ultimately, is not texts but the ways in which people from time out of mind have regularly come together to express those values that they have found to serve them best in their own struggle to survive.
[W]riting becomes woven through the entire class and lab experience. If they fall into a pitfall they can explain how they got there, and that’s education. The process also enables me to see how their mind worked. By having them describe how they arrived at a result I can comment on it, and they can make use of my comment when they go back to the experiment. There’s a feedback that isn’t possible when the teacher just grades from numerical answers. Revising helps the students to rethink.
Through the writing of our students we are reminded of their individuality.
It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.”