I hold an ideal that supports my obsession with writing very close to heart: we not only learn to write and write to learn, but we learn with and through writing. We write because the very act of making choices about what to say and how to say it forces us to make choices about who we are—how we will change through and with what we say—and who we want to write to.
Until recently, I’ve taken that truth, that truth to me at least, for granted. Sometimes I hear things that feel so good to try on and believe in I don’t give myself the space to question them. Sometimes writing does give me that space.
I took a class called The Essay in the winter and signed up to lead discussion pretty early on in the quarter. Part of the discussion leader assignment asks you to “take the floor” for a short amount of time, the purpose here being that you look especially closely at some topic in the readings for that week and share the conclusions of your careful reading with the class. I noticed each of our readings that week mentioned “truth”—something I wanted to believe wasn’t up for the debate and discussion these texts were putting them through. I’d “take the floor” while discussing the different truths these readings addressed.
Through planning my floor time, I learned something about truth that was not easy for me to accept: it’s not so absolute. Writing for me, at least until very recently, used to give me the sense that I was uncovering universal truths about myself, thinking, and the world. I wonder if this conviction has something to do with the way the academy teaches writing, which by no means is what writing has to mean to everyone all the time. At the university, students of most disciplines learn to write papers that present air-tight, thesis-driven arguments. They tell us, among other things:
Tell us what you’re going to argue and how you’re going to do it.
Support your argument.
Conclude by telling us why what you wrote is important. Why does it matter?
This is certainly a way to write and think, and it’s valued by most disciplines within the academy. Although, I wonder about the effects of so obviously privileging this kind of writing. If I believe in the ideal I presented in the opening of this post, that we learn with and through writing, does that mean that we condition ourselves to think the way we write? Do we want students of most disciplines to think about things in thesis-driven, air-tight, argumentative, monologic ways? Do we want those students to become active members of society that think in thesis-driven, air-tight, argumentative, monologic ways? Or do we want them to learn to think in open-minded, speculative, imaginative, dialogic, ways?
Interestingly, a central goal of liberal education is seemingly in opposition to the way most disciplines teach students to write: students take classes across a variety of disciplines to learn there are different ways to be and know things in the world. Ideally, this fosters an open-mindedness in students. I see the logic in this argument, and I certainly value this learning outcome of my liberal learning domains. Although, I was not aware I was learning about different ways to be and know at the time. I mostly felt confused—not angry about having to “take so many classes that have nothing to do with what I want to do,” as too many Freshmen are—but confused and frustrated that all of my professors acted like their way to be and know was the way to be and know—truth. It wasn’t until my Senior year that I began to understand that outcome of liberal education in the way I believe it was intended, and that was only because I was taking classes in which professors directly told me this was the case.
I think that confusion and frustration I was feeling—every professor of every discipline convinced that their way was the way—stemmed from the writing I was expected to produce in each class. While, yes, the writing I did for Cultural Anthropology 101 looked different from the writing I did for Urban Geography, I was still writing thesis-driven, closed, and argumentative papers. Perhaps the most destructive aspect of this kind of writing is its claim to certainty and universal truth. The ideas aren’t open for discussion—if you effectively support your argument there’s no room for doubt. I felt like I was expected to have my mind made before I even looked at sources. I had to know what I wanted to say and find some articles to support that thesis. I didn’t feel like I was becoming an open person at the time. I mostly felt like I wasn’t getting something.
If we want to instill openness in students, why not have them write that way? In the class I mentioned above, The Essay, I learned about what essays were like when they were originally “invented” by French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. The word essay comes from the French word “essais,” which literally means “trials” or “attempts.” His essays, and those that he inspired, were characterized by their authorial stance: speculative, meditative, questioning, wandering, exploratory, etc. I wrote two of my own essays over the course of the quarter, something that was far more comfortable than I imagined it would be after six years of writing very different essays. I didn’t have to make up my mind on a topic before writing. I was allowed to learn through and with writing, think before I made conclusions, and discover my own truths based on my own human experiences and feelings.
If we want students to think in open, questioning, and dialogic ways, we should encourage them to write like this. Maybe we don’t have to control our texts, thinking, and truths with our theses. Maybe there’s value in avoiding universal claims to truth. Maybe there’s value to being open to where writing takes you and allowing yourself to find ontological truths through and with your writing.