Do We Need To Change Why We Write?

October 30th, 2023

My relationship with writing has always been a pretty good one. I wouldn’t even consider myself a great, or even good, writer at this point, but my process has always been about self-discovery and being able to relate whatever the topic is to my life. In that aspect, I believe I have been successful. I have been able to learn a lot and become a better writer through a traditional American learning experience, but I fear we leave too much on the table in terms of reaching our potential as writers. 

For the most part, it is very hard for me to gauge how good of a writer I am. I’ve never done writing with any significance that was not an academic requirement. I’ve briefly touched on this before, but the topics that I write about have to be important to me otherwise my writing process will weaken. For example, in the recent white-paper project we did, I wrote about something that I was passionate about and something I had personal experience with. I was able to generate a decent product because of this, but process-wise, it felt nowhere close to complete. The process not feeling complete is a good thing. It means that there is internal motivation to continue to improve what has already been done. 

I believe that the best writers have a process that is never complete and that they have to make a hard decision to convince themselves it is finally ready for other eyes to read.

I am not a writer at that point…yet.

One of the most impactful things I read this week was from the article “The Source of Bad Writing”. In the piece, Pinkler writes, “Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.” I am someone who commits a lot of time to figuring out how the people closest to me think, so this was hard for me to read. I always try to involve, or at least acknowledge, what some other perspectives could be. 

When thinking about how I’ve been taught to write over the years, I have found there is a very weird relationship that does not get discussed enough. We are almost never taught to actually write for specific audiences. In an academic setting, our goal is almost never an impact on a potential audience. It is to understand and please the perspective of the professor/teacher, even if their intention is for students to write for a different audience. If we were to write with the goal of having a true impact on even just a single individual every time we write, our passion for the topic and writing process will be enhanced.