How much time do you spend writing each day? What’s that? You don’t write at all?
I am utterly convinced that the very act of writing can make a major difference in the way we think and learn. If we’re serious about learning we should get serious about writing. That’s not to say we should all become professional writers but we should certainly all spend time getting our thoughts down on paper or even tapped into a computer.
Here’s something Professor Brian Cambourne said at an education conference I attended in Singapore back in 1986.
Writing, in my opinion, is the most potent tool of learning and thinking that the human race has got available to it. We need to write in order to find out what we think and in order to shape our learning. The evidence from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics is quite conclusive. Writing is a highly complex act which depends upon analysis and synthesis of many different levels of thinking. I have a strong conviction that sustained engagement with the written form of language actually changes us cognitively.
I wish I could share the entire lecture that he gave but I only have it in video format and I’m not going to transcribe it all for you. Sorry.
What’s he saying? To over simplify, he’s saying that the very act of writing helps us to map out our thoughts and helps us learn. The processes that we use for writing are more powerful than the acts of simply speaking or listening.
Most bloggers would know this to be true. Even in the simple act of writing a blog post we can write, read, correct, read, restructure and read again before we finally hit the publish button. We take care to make sense and to be understood and it is in this process that we often more fully develop our own understanding of the subject matter.
Cambourne’s big concern is that most of us don’t engage with the written form of language nearly enough. Somewhere in the process of learning literacy we have adopted the thought that we’re not very good at writing and that it’s not something that most of us would do voluntarily without very good reason.
Even though the standard is sometimes less than brilliant, blogging has at least got millions of people mapping out their thoughts through writing.
What about you? Do you find writing difficult? How much do you write each day? Do you find that writing helps you clarify things in your own mind? Does it help you learn?
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