Writing Is “Primarily An Exercise In Logic”
I spoke today to the science-writing class at Yale College taught by my friend Carl Zimmer. The students were thoughtful, bright, and had great questions. There was one quote I paraphrased for them that I’ve now gone back and looked up because I wanted to get it exactly right. It’s from William Zinsser, the legendary Yale writing instructor and author of the best book about writing I know, On Writing Well (have a look at it here.) This is the quote:
Writing is “primarily an exercise in logic,” says Zinsser, which enables us to “write our way” into an understanding of texts or concepts that previously mystified us. Why make such an effort? Because “meaning is remarkably elusive . . . Writing enables us to find out what we know and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn.”
This is my experience of writing: as an exercise in logic. Because one word must come after another, and one sentence must follow another, writing forces me to make order out of my unruly thoughts. I find the act of writing to be soothing for that reason (and frustrating too sometimes, of course). It helps me make a little patch of order in a chaotic universe.
Does Zinsser’s description of writing resonate for you as well?
Yes his thoughts are just how I put it to myself. All my thoughts are jumbled up in my head. Writing them out brings them all together in to a complete picture.
Thanks for sharing.
Bryan
He (and you) are so right! I do think of great writers as artists. But for me, it’s an organizational tool. The writing skills we learn in school — how to structure a paragraph, how to back up a thesis, how to summarize — are skills that help us organize complex thoughts and ideas, and then share them. Sometimes it’s not until I finish writing about something that I see the simplicity in it.
Absolutely! Writing is a way for me to linearize, to turn into some kind of narrative or argument, the ideas I have stored in my brain as a more amorphous associative network.