What is the point of writing this? I hope this is of some benefit to someone — maybe just me.
Why am I writing this? It is a directed piece of self-development.
Being stuck in a rut isn’t fun but from my personal experience, these are the moments where self-awareness and the impetus for change become the most compelling — when life’s great how aware are you for the need to change? How motivated are you to change? With internal conflict and tensions, self-awareness begins to creep in and accepting the need for change and doing something about them begins to take root.
From my own perspective I found this liberating. You can choose to do things, things you have never done before and step outside your comfort zone. Really how scary is writing an article that no one will ever read or comment on; how scary is going somewhere new and taking up a new hobby you never thought about, or a multitude of other things.
From personal reflection, these small changes represent small acts of courage, and give some hope for the future — I can focus on what I can do and the acts of courage build my confidence. This is what writing this piece was all about, and I feel good about completing a promise to myself, irrespective of the perceived quality of the output. However, it’s appreciated this may not be same experience for everyone.
I know that my communications skills are weak, and it’s time to make a concerted effort to improve them. After brainstorming ideas for improvement, this came to mind as something suitably scary, challenging but with no real perceived downside. Writing puts logic into print, allowing it to be scrutinised and challenged. The act of rereading it allows the muddy thinking to be identified, and potentially corrected as part of the learning process.
How the learning process will develop and evolve will be an ongoing effort, but it will need to start somewhere. As nothing will ever be perfect, just putting the thinking out there for better or worse develops tolerance for imperfection, and helps build a “doing” habit. I feel it helps develop the resilience in accepting and being uncomfortable with being wrong. Over time, there is an opportunity to reflect, correct and improve. The point may simply be answering the important question of “what did I learn from this?” and trying to find ways of putting that learning into practice.
Writing
Writing is hard! The previous section reflected on positive motivations for writing this. When it came to doing the writing, all the different ideas, thoughts and directions lead to the purpose of this article changing many times, and it ended up being a reflective piece about writing this article. Maybe that’s a generalisable idea in life — through serendipity and the development of what you do changes the output overtime, and eventually it becomes something else based on what you learned and explored as part of the process? Hence, indicating the importance of the process as part of developing something.
One challenge was the constraints. Because of time constraints there was a need for a word count. This was a real challenge. So many ideas, but with so few words available to express the argument, reference and develop the concepts. Wow. You can’t include every idea or thought, as you can’t read every book or newspaper. So, the question is what do you include and why?
It was interesting that these constraints framed so many choices. As this was a development exercise, I started to think about unpacking the choices — there are so many. The idea here was that by unpacking choices, I could see some of the logic of why the choice was made and to identify points where feedback could be reviewed — essentially trying to unpack where “feel” was used in the writing, so that the tacit might be brought into the explicit.
As an initial exercise the value of consciously reviewing choices will make improvements to how I write is unknown. However, Langer (1997) indicates the benefits of a mindful approach to learning as opposed to mindless — through deliberate thinking for yourself one can understand the domain and adopt the approach and techniques to the context at hand. Thus, the unpacking of the choices makes them explicit allowing for conscious reflection on them, which from above potentially improves the quality of future choices.
However, there is a tension between too much analysis, which can slow down the process and lead to analysis paralysis or deep focus in the wrong areas, and failing to put any thought into the content and feedback and hence, not learn anything from the process. Therefore, an initial assumption was made that looking at how I write through these lenses, the unpacked questions and choices, will be slow at first but over time, though review and comparison with the work of others, eventually improve how I write. I also assume that through experience identifying what is important for improvement will speed the process up.
From the unpacking the constraints framed more choices that originally imagined. It is clear that the narrative was influenced by my subjective, subconscious biases. It’s easy to identify some of these — after reading I certainly believe that this approach will be beneficial although there isn’t the evidence to confirm this. Feel free to identify anymore, as these are personal blind spots.
It is interesting to reflect on what this piece would look like with different choices — content, viewpoints and perspectives. For instance, this is a reflective piece on writing a first article. It represents only a single viewpoint and perspective. As part of writing this, questions arose of how generalisable my experience is?
This led to a further range of questions such as:
· What have others who have written thought of the experience?
· What was their process?
· How did they learn?
· What are the qualities of good writing?
· How well do we know what they are — are they subjective and do we only know good writing when we see it?
· Do we know how to improve the quality of our writing — or again is it subjective and there are no hard and fast ways to become a better writer?
Currently, I don’t know the answers to these and they are worth further exploration. I clearly assumed that to improve the quality of my writing I would need to practice writing. However, does this approach represent deliberate practice (Ericsson et al., 2007)? If not, how would the approach need to be adapted? Again, these are questions that arose as part of the unpacking of the article, and may be worth some thought as part of the ongoing process.
Furthermore, this could be a good self-development exercise — presenting different questions and viewpoints on a similar subject. Forced to take different perspectives, would, I feel, develop more of an open-minded approach and challenge some personal biases. This aligns with the approach Tetlock and Gardner (2015) argue for improved thinking through developing more balance in the opinions and arguments; it is worth considering in future writing.
Clearly the choices on content etc., present a direct link to the thinking behind the writing. What about the choices in how the text was constructed, headings, paragraphs, flow etc.? Does unpacking these choices make a difference? This is an interesting question as it assumes that the approach can be broken down into the content, technical aspects and style. Paragraph structures, grammar etc., are the basis of education and numerous books. This is fairly well known, and with the exception of the pedants, something that can and is necessarily learned as part of the educational process. So, it would be likely that actively practicing reading and writing would improve this ability.
However, what about the logical progression, style, choices of words and their affect? Logical progression, forms the common thread passing through the writing; the scaffold that allows the reader to work their way to the end. The straighter the scaffold and tauter the thread, the easier the progression is made and the clearer the presentation. I believe that the clearer the presentation the easier it is to uncover muddy or poor thinking. However, does clear presentation overcome muddy or poor thinking? I’m not sure I would agree with this last point, however, the arguments flaws would be more easily uncovered.
As the presentation of an argument is the logical progress of the thinking, it is naturally explicit rather than tacit. It becomes clear on the re-read, how the evidence is drawn together to form a conclusion. Although the evidence can be questioned, the presentation is explicit, systematic and ordered; there are many examples of good and bad arguments, and through comparisons, the differences between good and poorly laid out arguments are fairly clear and accessible. Therefore, logical progression and making an argument should be something that can be learned and improved through practice. I would suggest this is probably improved through wider reading, proof reading your own work and reflection.
However, affect in writing, the flow and the style — this feels very subjective and ephemeral and laying within the tacit. Can the tacit, specifically the more ephemeral variety ever become explicit, and what would be lost in the process? Can you really learn style, or is it something you develop by consistently copying from others, the Benjamin Franklin approach? Hence, based on your own learnings, do you find your voice through the consistent and wrote learning of this approach? Is this akin to Langer’s (197) idea of expertise — knowing when to follow the rules and when to break them is the sign of the expert? Hence, does the Benjamin Franklin approach teach the basics, and after the basics you develop your own voice? This would be something useful to consider, however, I feel that of all the skills, this is the most difficult to learn and develop — whether it can be taught is another question.
There probably is many books and articles written on this subject, I haven’t researched and am unaware of. These may provide answers to my questions and far better answers than I can ever give. Nonetheless, this was a starting exercise, a first attempt at something new, which provided the deep insight how much I don’t know and there is far more to explore.
Conclusion
Writing an article is hard, but I stepped out of my comfort zone and did something new. It felt empowering and I feel it represents a small step of courage and at least makes me feel better for doing what I said I was going to do! Although writing is hard, it can be done, and something can be placed out there to make you suitably uncomfortable but with little actual risk.
As it was a personal reflection of trying to write something, it met its goal. However, it asked many more questions than it answered. This was interesting that a simple piece of writing can lead to a range of questions by unpacking the process. However, these might be useful starting points for a deliberate practice approach in the future. Also some learning was made from the experience by laying something out in text to discern the logic and the thinking — even if it proved how much I don’t know!
Moreover, after proof reading this article, my muddy thinking has slightly clarified. Although there is a significant journey ahead, it’s a first step of the long arduous journey. Moreover, the questions, ideas and opportunities identified present a potential path forward to improvement which wouldn’t hurt to try.
From the above, I felt that I learned something from the experience and feel that trying is the first step to making some improvement in an area you would like to do improve. I hope something useful came out of this exercise for you too, even if it was to prove that anyone can write something if they try, and there is nothing for you to fear to write something as well — you can most likely do much better than this!
References
Langer, E. (1997). The power of mindful learning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Ericsson, Karl & Prietula, Mj & Cokely, Edward. (2006). The making of an expert. Harvard Business Review. 85. 114–21, 193.
Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction.
