Would You Rather ‘Write in General’ or be a ‘Problematic’ Writer? Can we write in general? Should we look beyond the general idea of text to become “Good Writers”?
As I began to blog about this topic, I thought of the concept and had the urge to simply ‘write in general’. However, according to Elizabeth Wardle; there’s no such thing. There’s no ‘writing in general’, but rather ALWAYS in particular. However, one side of my brain agrees and the other half of my brain is still intensely processing this concept. In order to ‘write’ in general there has to be some sort of ‘aim or goal’. I even tried testing out what Wardle suggested. Grabbing paper, pen and clearly grabbing intentions or SOME specific topic to actually write a decent assignment or document without the learned conventions from school, work, or a course, but, I was unsuccessful. Therefore, this theory may be pretty accurate.
When you decide to grab that pen or pencil and apply it to paper or simply type out your thoughts; what are you actually trying to say? What are you going to ‘write’ about? As stated in her article, no single class or workshop can teach people how to write, but rather they can give them the ideas or concepts to ignite their thoughts. If this notion to not be able to ‘write in general’ is utilized and remembered; we’ll be able to effectively repurpose or transfer what we already know and apply it to our writing situations. This will possibly make our writing lives smoother and easier. Now, I discovered a cool correlation between Wardle and a second article that I read from Catherine Savini’s titled ‘Looking for Trouble’.
While Wardle suggests that we may not be able to ‘write in general’; Savini says if we find the ‘problems’ within the writing; it’ll prompt us to become great writers. At first thought, I was like uhhhh now why would I want to become a problematic writer, lol, but Savini is basically telling us to focus on the tensions in the text and articulate what you’re writing which will prompt more questions and curiosity. I loved how Savini correlates writing to suffering because it can definitely seem like a tedious task at times depending on the discourse community, audience, or concept you may be writing for. However, problems and complexity assists with our personal and professional successes.
It’s also what makes us successful leaders and fosters our power of Integrative Thinking. This type of thinking pretty much sums up the idea of being able to hold two ideas at the same time while having the ability to retain information and function to create a 3rd idea. This ultimately produces new insights and develop new alternatives. Pretty similar to Wardle’s theory of having to write towards a certain goal or thinking of writing as a process.
Savini tells us that problems are a process. A different mode of thinking, which can be effective in any approach or discipline. However, Wardle tells us that utilizing these different processes of thinking allows us to use, repurpose, and transfer what we know to effectively write, overall, but not in general.
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