The Purpose of Writing
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The Purpose of Writing
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Re: The Purpose of Writing
#2Interesting read! I'm not a particularly good writer, but I do find it useful to explore my thoughts through the written word.
I just finished an experiment where I wrote a blog article every day for 30 days (a more detailed summary is here https://www.philnewton.net/blog/30-day-blogging-summary/). I normally only write a few posts every year, so it was a pretty big increase for me. I don't think it improved my writing skills in any significant way, but it did bring out a lot of ideas that had been floating around in the back of my mind.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#3In pre-modern times rhetoric served a similar purpose. You had to devise a persuasive speech on any topic at the drop of a hat. You had to clear develop your arguments evidence. It was one of seven subjects in liberal higher education.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#4One of the other important things about writing is not to let your opinions and conclusions get to your head. You're not some profound guru because you took 10 hours out of your life to figure out how some natural phenomenon works. You're also not someone even worthy of showing as a blip on the history books. You're just an average Joe.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#5>If you care about being less wrong tomorrow than you are today, you have to take this extreme attitude towards criticism. It will show in your writings and in the way you express your ideas. If you want to be perceived as smart and right, you will articulate your ideas in a moderate way so that others agree with it. (This is one of the main problems I have with contemporary intellectuals who always seem to take the middle ground.) If you are searching for truth, you will articulate the most extreme and radical consequences of your ideas, precisely because others will disagree with them and tell you where your ideas are wrong.
I wish it were like this. In reality, your ideas will just be ignored or dismissed as kooky and stupid, if they are too extreme. Newspapers and intellectual publications use nuance because that is what is needed to build credibility. Appealing to extremes may work for fiction but will not work if you're trying to persuade a skeptical reader about something that is factual in nature. It is not that people cannot handle the truth, but if you make extreme opinions and conjectures, your burden of proof just becomes that much bigger. If the goal is to persuade, the last thing you want to do is give the reader a reason to dismiss you outright.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#6Tim Ferriss frequently talks about the writing class he took with John McPhee (author of Levels of the Game) and how as he took that class, the grades went up in the rest of his classes.
He says it’s probably due to refined thinking from taking the class.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#7Great article - I agree! In fact, the author could go further IMO.
"However, more often than discovering that your ideas are wrong, you will discover something different: that you do not know what you think."
Writing and thinking (2 sides to the same coin IMO) have been illuminating to me. Hence I have moved to becoming a skeptic (ultra-skeptic in most people's opinion). Knowing what you know, and why you know is everything. 'Believing you know' is everywhere...
We live in a world of stories.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#8Very well written article!
> "However, more often than discovering that your ideas are wrong, you will discover something different: that you do not know what you think. Sure, you have some vague idea, and you believe that there is a chain of reasoning that leads to a certain conclusion. But what you will discover is that this chain of reasoning is mostly not existent. At best, it has many holes and maybe leads not where you think it does. This discovery is, of course, very unpleasant and sometimes even painful."
This part does a particularly good job of explaining something that's been on the tip of my tongue for a while, but I could not have expressed it as clearly (in a rather curious, recursive way, my not being able to express it, is what is being described).
The article also dances around the idea of the Generation Effect [0], which is, in my opinion, another great reason to write - even without an audience.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#9On a less ambitious note, technical writing is useful even if never published because it also reveals to you what you don’t know about a subject.
As soon as you start waving your hands (metaphorically) you immediately sense recognize a conceptual gap, especially if you suddenly jump to the passive tense.
Re: The Purpose of Writing
#10>If you care about being less wrong tomorrow than you are today, you have to take this extreme attitude towards criticism. It will show in your writings and in the way you express your ideas. If you want to be perceived as smart and right, you will articulate your ideas in a moderate way so that others agree with it. (This is one of the main problems I have with contemporary intellectuals who always seem to take the…
> If the goal is to persuade, the last thing you want to do is give the reader a reason to dismiss you outright.
I think the point this article is making is that writing is the pursuit of truth, not the pursuit of persuasion. It doesn’t matter how many people agree with you unless you’re trying to sell something.