This is a transcript of one of the videos in a unit of the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Writing is connected to thinking
One of the things that excites me about writing is its connection to thinking. I do think that writing and thinking are very closely related.
Now, you’ve had likely had an experience like this. You’ve got a dull idea in the back of your mind. You’re not really sure what it is, but as you write it down, it becomes a little bit clearer. Ohh I can now think a bit more about that, and as I do I can write a little bit more about it and I can think a bit more and write a bit more and over time the idea becomes richer and starts to take shape.
And when I’m talking about writing in this sense, it’s not necessarily a complete English sentence. It could just be a word or a phrase, or maybe even a diagram.
Making the implicit explicit
But what’s happening is you’re taking those dull, fuzzy ideas in the back of your mind, and you’re putting them down on a page or on a screen and making them explicit so that you’re now able to interact with them.
That is the power of writing. I do think that writing and thinking are very closely related and that’s why much of what I talk about in this course is all about the thinking processes.
I would be saying you cannot write well until you can think well, it is vital.
The downside
Now, while I do think that there is a close relationship between writing and thinking, I also think there’s a downside to the relationship.
And the downside is this that when I write something I’m exposing my thinking and people might make some judgments about me and my capability through what they see in my written work. I guess that’s just another reason to be striving hard to write as well as you can.
Just a quick story, I was working with one of our big insurance companies in Sydney. It’s a few years ago now. I was working with a programme manager and he had 12 different projects that were reporting to him. This was as they were trying to move their or their software development into the cloud. Anyway, these project managers would provide a project report, I think it was once a fortnight, to the programme manager.
He came to me one day and said I’d like you to work with these project managers. I can’t understand their project reports. This bloke was no dill. He’d actually sponsored these projects so he knew a bit about them on what was going on.
But then he said something that has stuck with me, he said. How can I have confidence in these people as project managers if they can’t articulate what’s going on in their project?
He was making some judgments about people based on what he saw in their written work. Now we ended up having a happy ending to the story, but what he said has just been with me all these years because he so clearly articulated the downside of that relationship between writing and thinking.
So writing and thinking are closely related. You cannot write well until you can think well.
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