Good Writing Tests the Writer
Writing serves a purpose beyond communication....
Writing serves a purpose beyond communication for me. I have a lot of ideas, many of them correct, some of them… not so much. That’s the standard human state, and I have no objections to it. Being wrong sometimes is a beneficial part of life; it teaches humility and rigor. The problem is when I don’t immediately recognize that I’m wrong. Writing serves as a gateway to force those instances out into the open.
I recently had a (somewhat painful) example of this.
I’m working on my last year of college, pre-law, and as a result, I had a paper on First Amendment law, due so soon as I could finish writing it. Thankfully, a week or so into the course (each course takes about three-four weeks, doing it only; they’re self-paced), I had an idea. It came to me at one in the morning, a fully fledged essay idea, with enough meat to fill the minimum word count and enough obvious points for research to find the requisite number of non-curriculum sources (well, exceed. I’m pretty sure the minimum is five? But I often have 10+). I rolled out of bed, mumbled a memo to myself in a video on my phone, and got back into bed.
About two weeks later, I sat down to write the outline for my paper. I already had the idea; the outline, I hoped, would be nearly a first draft. I set to work.
The argument fell apart in my hands. I could write an outline, but I hated it. The pieces didn’t mesh; the ideas didn’t flow into each other; the whole thing was a disjointed mess. My outline was a barebones set of ideas, not a workable outline. I discovered, in having to work through the writing process, that my 1AM idea was (wonder of wonders) only half-baked. Or I’d forgotten the part that made it work (entirely possible, though I don’t see what that could have been).
The fact is, outlining and writing up an argument forces it to flesh out. Each element comes into the light. Counters have to be recognized; implication have to be written out in plain language. The point of the writing is to communicate the argument, after all, and that means putting the argument out in its fullest strength, nothing less. The problem comes when its ‘fullest strength’ exposes a missing premise or an unsupported conclusion. In the case of my 1AM genius, I’d forgotten that if an unsustainable statement has two alterable definitions, altering either of which stabilizes the statement, then proving that one alteration is necessary makes the other alteration unnecessary.
Nevertheless, I moved ahead. I moderated the argument to argue for each definition separately, wrote a first draft up, and was still unsatisfied. The paper felt janky, full of half-proved points, over-assertions, and shaky chains of logic. I was convinced that I had a lot of truth in the paper, but I didn’t think that a really critical reader would be convinced, not if he was thorough.
On review, several problems emerged. The combination of the two altered definitions, for instance, conflicted with a conclusion I believed true for other reasons. Worse, the first, less-substantiated definition really wasn’t sufficiently proven. I don’t think the conclusion was wrong; it was at least within touch-distance of correct. I just hadn’t proven it, nor did I have the evidence (or time to gather evidence) to do so. That bit had to go- which left the question of how to get the paper to be long enough.
I played around for a while with different premises for the paper. One would be entirely separate. Another I could hybridize with the workable elements of my first draft. On second read-through, however, the material I’d founded that idea on wasn’t quite coordinate with the subject I wanted to address, and it wasn’t enough for a paper in itself, not without significant time gathering other evidence.
In the process of attempting multiple fresh outlines (and reflecting on just what difficulties had attended writing the first draft), I realized a fundamental problem with my paper, with the definition I did have enough evidence to prove: I didn’t actually know what definition I was arguing for. I knew plenty about what the definition wasn’t, but I didn’t know what it was, only the rough range it sat within. That realization led to multiple tries at definition.
Eventually, after multiple attempts and a fresh look at the evidence, I figured out that definition; even better, I found that the definition provided a logical through-line to build the paper around: opposition definition (explanation and inadequacy), evidence type A for my definition, evidence type B. The result was the first draft (second, fourth draft) currently nearing completion in a different Word document.
The point of all this is to say: because writing forces me to think through an idea in order to communicate it clearly and persuasively, it forces me to ask if the argument, clearly stated, really ought to persuade. It acts as a filter and a recalibration of my thought-process, exposing intricacies and potential difficulties which hasty, intuitive thought can miss, problematic or probative implications. If the argument is good, it becomes stronger; if the argument is sound but lacks evidence, its lack of probative power becomes clear; if the argument is flawed, the flaws become clear, even if they don’t disprove the conclusion.
In that initial 1AM idea, I had some conclusions that were roughly correct, vague approximations of the truth that didn’t pretend to be more than vague approximations. The arguments I produced, however, were unsound; the arguments I produced in trying to refine those unsound starting points continued to be flawed, even with the truth they contained. Writing forced those flaws to the surface, like smelting metal, melting away the intuitive structure and the biases providing hidden reinforcement, exposing the dross.
This function of writing is one of the reasons I find writing nonfiction to be immensely personally beneficial, besides my enjoyment of meaningful debate and of sharing the truth. Writing isn’t the only way to achieve this pruning. The mechanism here is that clear, persuasive communication requires clarity and persuasiveness; clarity destroys persuasiveness, though, if the argument is bad, meaning that the argument must be good to be persuasive when clearly communicated. Talking something through with a friend can have a similar effect (with the added benefit of real-time critique), so long as rhetoric remains lashed by truth and clarity, not wielded by bias. Talking the argument through out-loud is another mechanism of self-checking, one similar to writing if more ephemeral (unless recorded). The point is to examine each argument carefully, weighing it against logic and truth (Acts 17:11).
God bless.