Ed Blog / Why Write At All

Writing Is How You Find Out What You Think

The sentence you cannot finish is telling you something about the thinking behind it.

Ask a teacher why a lesson worked and you will usually get a plausible answer delivered with reasonable confidence. Ask the same teacher to write four hundred words explaining it and something different happens. The confident answer turns out to be a summary of a summary. Underneath it there is either a real chain of reasoning or there is a habit that has never been examined. Writing is the instrument that tells you which. It is not a gentle instrument. You will draft a sentence beginning with the words because students, and then you will stop, because you notice that what follows is a generalisation you have never actually tested and would not defend if challenged.

This is why writing beats talking as a way of finding out what you think. Speech tolerates gaps. A listener fills them in, nods, moves the conversation on, and both of you leave believing something was established. Written prose does not cooperate. The gap sits on the screen. You either fill it honestly or you delete the claim, and either outcome leaves you knowing more than you did. Teachers who write about practice describe this as the main return on the time: not the finished post but the twenty minutes in the middle where the argument fell apart and had to be rebuilt on something sturdier.

It also improves the ordinary talking. Having written the careful version once, you carry it. When a colleague asks what you are doing with a particular group, or a manager wants a rationale, or a student asks why the assessment is structured the way it is, you are not improvising. You are recalling. That is a practical advantage available to anyone willing to spend an hour a fortnight arguing with themselves in a document.