The Value of Writing

(These are my thoughts and notes after having watched two Leadership Lab lectures by Professor Larry McEnerney. "The Craft of Writing Effectively" and "Writing Beyond the Academy" I'm occasionally asked about writing - how I approach the craft, tools I use, etc. But I don't consider myself a master of the art as yet, so I'd rather point people toward other sources. Today, I'm highly recommending Prof. McEnerney's lectures.)

"I use writing to help me think."

I hear this a lot. Not just because I say it a lot. Many writers I've known have said something similar. Writing can help organize new information, point to gaps in knowledge, clarify complex topics, and entertain. In the process, writing just might persuade readers to think differently about the world. If your objective for writing is the latter, than your writing must also be valuable for the reader. If it isn't, the reader will be forced to slow down. Then they'll become frustrated and start skipping. Then they'll stop reading.

Writing something of value isn't about expressing your ideas, it is about changing the reader’s ideas.

Unsuccessful writers aren't thinking beyond their own objectives for writing - a limitation that's the end result of the way we were taught to write throughout grade school and college. We wrote for readers (teachers) who were paid to read what we wrote. (Would they read what you wrote if they weren't being paid?) The rules we learned in that system (school) were focused on explaining and demonstrating to teachers that we understood what was taught. What we learned about writing works against us when we strive to create things that are valuable to readers.

In the real world, people aren't paid to care about what we write, they will only read our work if they believe it is valuable to them. Writing in school is a different game from writing in the real world. Think of it as the difference between being an employee and being self-employed. Different rules. Different risks. Different rewards. It's a different game.

The two lectures from Prof. McEnerney are directed toward academic writers. However, I believe the material is much more broadly applicable, as Prof. McEnerney hints to multiple times throughout his lectures. I've organized the ideas from these two lectures into four broad categories: Purpose, Readers, Structure, and Strategy. Of course, I'm doing this to help me understand the material and organize it in a way useful to me. There is overlap between these categories (as there must be), but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover where that is. Your take on these lectures and where the material applies in your life will be different, but I hope the work I've done will be of some use to you, too.

A brief sidebar about "knowledge" before getting into the notes. The structure of knowledge is a central part of Prof. McEnerney's lectures. The way I've found it most useful to think about knowledge is that it's unstable and time dependent. With very few exceptions, knowledge has a half-life. It decays as time goes by and people discover new things about Life, The Universe, and Everything. Knowledge can also be specific to communities. If you're ever involved with a project aimed at organizing knowledge inside an organization or finding a stable knowledge management system to use, you'll soon understand just how unstable knowledge can be. My list of stable knowledge is extremely short and includes things like the Laws of Thermodynamics and the fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and duct tape.) For a more in-depth understanding on this point see David Deutsch's discussion of knowledge in "The Beginning of Infinity."

(n.b. Some these points are direct quotes, some are summaries. After 2.5 hours of lecture, I've lost track. Consider them all quotes but verify them for yourself.)

Purpose

1. If you intend to write something that is valuable to your readers, you need to know the readers in your community. If you don't know the community, how can you provide value?

2. It's not enough to know the subject you're writing about. You need to know your readers.

3. Writing to convey your ideas - what's inside your head - to your readers isn't the primary purpose. Write to change the ideas your readers have.

4. The goal isn't original work. The goal is valuable work. If you were to count the number of people within a 10 meter radius of you and reported that number, that would be original work. It would be information that no one knew before. But would it be valuable? Probably not. No one would care, particularly your readers.

5. The goal of your writing is to move the conversation forward, not preserve the current state indefinitely.

6. "The function of your writing is to move knowledge forward, it can’t do that in your desk draw." Get out there. Experiment. Discover. And have fun while doing that. Participate in the world not by sharing your feelings or your thoughts but by changing other people’s thoughts.

"Your job is to change the way your readers think. Your relationship to your own knowledge is the same as the relationship a farmer has with the wheat they produce and a miner to the coal. The relationship is the value you provide. That’s an uncomfortable truth that people don’t like."

Nothing will be accepted as knowledge or understanding until it has been challenged by someone competent to challenge. Your readers have the professional function of challenging what you said.