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What Does it Mean to be a “Writer”?

Jim Mason
Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!
2 min readJan 22, 2025

Is that description more meaningful than being a “Talker”?

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

All of us who write here on Medium can call ourselves “writers”. (I sometimes call myself a “wordworker” as a comparative tribute to woodworkers.) And many well-known people have been referred to as “writers” or “poets”. But how meaningful a description is that?

Perhaps “writer” can apply in a meaningful way to people who make a living income from writing — professional writers. Yet many such people are now threatened by “AI” text generators that can produce readable text much faster and less expensively than they can.

So if we write, it’s not very meaningful to call ourselves “writers”. I would like to know what a person writes about and why they write.

I write mainly to describe observations that I have made during my lifetime of our remarkable human species — social animals who have created amazing things because of our development of spoken languages, written languages, drawings, mathematical notations, and other means of communications that enable us to coordinate our actions in ways that no other animals are able to do.

In writing what I do, I attempt to share my ideas and beliefs with other people like you, in order to influence the development of your ideas and beliefs and your subsequent behavior.

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Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!
Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!

Published in Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!

A place for duuudes of all sexes, ages, religions, and coffee-preferences to hang out and shoot the sh!t about their latest creations, to brag, lament, query, or quote, it’s all good…

Jim Mason
Jim Mason

Written by Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership

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