Writing to discover helps people express themselves better

By Lethbridge Herald on December 20, 2024.

DAN O’DONNELL

 My column last week was about the new movie, “The Conclave,” starring Ralph Fiennes. And about how humans can use writing to transcend time by leaving notes to the future. And about how it is often the things that are not meant for posterity, like receipts and business documents, that are nevertheless the most interesting. And about how much fun it can be to discover these accidental glimpses into the past.

But none of that was what I was supposed to be writing about. It is just where I ended up.

What I was supposed to be writing about was teaching “writing to discover.” This is  a technique that encourages students to write without an obvious goal in mind. To use the process itself to discover what it is they think about a topic, or, indeed, define the topic itself.

But that’s also what happened to me last week. Through writing, I discovered something. 

That I wanted to write about something else. 

In fact, “writing to discover” is how I write these columns. I usually begin with a very broad sense of what (I think) I want to talk about, and sometimes an opening sentence or two. 

But after I sit down at the computer, I let the writing take me where it wants.

And if that means that “The Conclave” turns out to be a better introduction to the subject of writing and immortality than it does to writing and discovery, then so be it.

This is immensely fun. And I appreciate it when I think I see it in the work of others. Two of my favourite columnists, for example, are Shannon Proudfoot and Cathal Kelly.

 It is rare when you don’t find a sudden and unexpected turn in their pieces. A discussion of the high pay of athletes that begins with the batmobile, runs through the U.S. election, and ends up with a riff on Shakespeare’s famous line about killing “all the lawyers” — except it won’t be the lawyers who get killed this time, Kelly tells us, since “they seem as miserable as the rest of us.” 

Or an article by Shannon Proudfoot about the challenges facing Pierre Pollievre, where she pauses to wonder if the Opposition leader’s constant criticism of Justin Trudeau for everything from the housing crisis to food costs might not have the perverse effect of making the Prime Minister seem at least industrious in his fecklessness.

In a certain sense, “writing to discover” is really a way of trying to do in writing what we already do in conversation.

 We tend to think of language as being what is written. We often describe the time before writing develops in a society as its “pre-history,” for example. 

And I know from teaching grammar at the university just how difficult it is to get students to distinguish between artifacts of writing — like the apostrophe in “apostrophe s” or the way we use spacing — and the actual language we speak.

But writing is very much secondary to speech. We learn language by speaking or signing and almost all of us have a far better “ear” than we do an “eye.” 

We can more easily hear grammatical errors when they are read out to us, and nobody makes as many mistakes in things like word-choice when they speak as when they write. 

By encouraging students to write the way they speak — by thinking through the words they use — “writing to discover” tries to help people think and express themselves better.

In a sign of how effective it can be, most students do much better when they are given the freedom to write this way. When I encourage my students to blog, for example, they make none of the errors they do in their more formal essays. 

And when we use the “unessay” — a method in which students are asked to decide everything about their work from its topic to its format — the quality of both ideas and expression goes up immensely.

This time, it looks like, I ended up more or less where I intended to. Though not without some unexpected byways. But that’s what’s fun about writing. 

And I hope reading. It certainly is of thinking.