Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

But I had never thought about thinking as a process. How does it work? Why do some people think straighter than others? What are the factors that prevent us from thinking clearly? Can it be taught? I made a note to buy The Art of Thinking when I got back home. I suspected that it would help me to see how so much fuzz gets into the writing machinery

great paper in philosophy is often one that tells me why the student couldn’t get where he wanted to go. That’s progress. It’s better than deluding yourself that something was proved that really hadn’t been.”

They can be cured only by that most painful of surgical procedures: operating on what the writer has actually written.

Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But nobody

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.

Other people’s rules are shackles on the mind. Timidity never produced a good piece of writing.

The best art of the past hundred years came into being on occasions when nothing from the past would fill the bill.

Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism—pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor—for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organ

an act of writing is an act of thinking—an organic compound, as the chemists would say. There’s little point in having a teacher clean up the messy syntax in a chemistry paper if he can’t also clean up the messy chemistry. The indivisibility of language is what gives writing its authority and its majesty.

I thought of how often as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another—by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document—a letter, for instance—had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and