Writing to Learn (I)
A review of a book that I have yet to read
Sometimes the name of a book is so well chosen that it frees us from the need to read what lies within its covers. Such was my experience with such Goliaths of pop psychology as Emotional Intelligence and Thinking Fast and Slow: spending several hours those texts taught me little more than I might have obtained by reflecting upon their titles . Such, I suspect, will also be the case with William Zinsser’s Writing to Learn.
Like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, who spoke prose long before he had a name for it, I have been ‘writing to learn’ avant la lettre for a good half-century. Indeed, if I examine the motivations that turned me into the ink-stained wretch I have become, quests to make sense of novelties have long proved more powerful than any desire to share insights that, like Athena imprisoned in the head of Zeus, had already achieved a mature form before escaping into the wider world.
Recently, for example, I wrote my first music review. The wee article weighed in at 473 words. Nonetheless, as the composition of every second sentence required both the discovery of new knowledge and the search for ways to express it, completing the piece required much more in the way of time and trouble than such a modest word count might suggest. Indeed, as regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I sacrificed three or four posts of customary kinds on the altar of that adventure into terra incognita.
At the mid-point of the project, I ran into a six-minute video on the subject of Writing to Learn and, in particular, its author. As I was already familiar with the broad outlines of the life and work of Mr. Zinsser, the review provided little in the way of new information. However, in showcasing the title of the book he was reviewing, the creator of the video, Giles McMillan-Klein, put a name on the thing I was trying to do.
This simple service did much to reduce the frustration that I felt at my failure to write as quickly as I usually did. It also reminded me that much of the ‘writer’s block’ I had experienced over the years might well have stemmed from my failure to distinguish between ‘writing to learn’ and writing to share what I already knew.
Notwithstanding the good work wrought by the title of Writing to Learn, it’s quite possible that the book itself has more to offer. Thus, even though I have just finished reviewing the book, the next item on this morning’s agenda is ordering myself a copy.
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Well, you certainly sold me on it.