The Learning Commons
Why Write?As a community, Guilford values the role writing plays in the learning process; this affects all disciplines. So what does that mean in practical terms? It means you'll be writing papers not only in courses such as English, history, philosophy, but also in math, physics, and chemistry. A paper for a math class, you ask? Don't you just need to know the formulas to know math? Well, Guilford professors believe that knowing the history of, say, Euclid gives students an understanding of Euclidian geometry that formulas alone can't offer, thus giving students multiple ways of understanding math. The same philosophy holds true across the campus and across disciplines. While there are designated writing intensive courses, most courses at Guilford incorporate writing as a way of making sense of the subject at hand. Which begs the question, why write?
Practical ConsiderationsNo matter what you do after college, writing will help you succeed. If you don't write well, you'll be handicapped, and severely. A few years ago, the University of Maryland polled 3,000 of its graduates. Nearly all respondents, including professors, lawyers, engineers, police officers, reported spending at least 20% of their work week writing; one in four reported spending at least 70% writing. It has been estimated that 85% of communication in the working world is carried out in writing. Potential employers rank communications skills as one of the highest priorities in evaluating job candidates. Even the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) has recently been revised to include a test of writing skills. Many employers are convinced that you can be trained to perform specific tasks, but you cannot be trained to write well, that if you have not developed your communication skills in college, they will not appear magically later. Once you are on the job, writing will also help determine the rate and extent of your advancement. Axel Leijonhufvud, chairman of the economics department at UCLA, once confided that he did not see himself as being any smarter than any other economist he knew; he attributed his rise to national prominence to being able to write better than the others. You, like Leijonhufvud, will be judged and promoted on the basis of your reports, memos, letters, articles. This judging begins early here at Guilford. You are evaluated for admission partly on the basis of essays. Throughout your four years here, your performance in courses will be assessed constantly on the basis of your writing. Former Dean Nancy Cable-Wells noted that an important application requirement for all leadership positions (over 400) is a written description of background and interest. Competitive scholarships such as the Hoyle and the Alden use the written essay as an important screening tool.
Write to LearnHere's something else to consider: Writing is itself a way of learning. That statement may strike some students as ironic. For many, writing seems to hinder learning. They view writing as simply the medium for presenting a finished product to a teacher; and before that presenting takes place, worries about getting spelling and grammar correct can actually interfere with the generating of ideas, perhaps even lead to crippling writer's block. But numerous studies demonstrate that students who write about what they are learning learn the material more thoroughly and remember it better and longer. How can this be so? Writing is not simply a medium. It is a tool of exploration, a voyage of discovery, one that leads not only to new ideas but clearer ideas. As Maxine Hairston points out in Successful Writing, "writing about a topic stimulates our thinking on that topic and helps us to probe knowledge and experiences we have stored in our subconscious mind." Moreover, writing makes this knowledge more precise. Hairston goes on to say, "often we can clarify vague or elusive concepts for ourselves by writing about them." Sometimes just submitting a difficult thought to the grammar of a sentence (with the sequential logic which a sentence requires) enables the writer to see an idea better. Many of you have undoubtedly experienced this phenomenon in keeping journals, in writing letters to friends, or in your e-mail communications. Writing involves constantly putting things together -- words, sentences, paragraphs. And putting together, again in Hairston's words, forces us to "make connections, see relationships, and draw analogies that would not have occurred to us if we had not started to write." Discovery. And as for learning rather than just discovering the new knowledge: research in cognitive psychology has established that if new material is to stay in our long-term memory, we need to graft it to what is already there. Our subconscious must engage in private conversation with itself, as it were, constantly attempting to fit the new material into the knowledge structure we already possess (thereby enlarging the knowledge structure in the process). When we write, we stimulate the cognitive functions necessary for this conversation to occur.
Define and Free Your SelfHere's a thought for a bad day. Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek) suggests that writing can actually save the universe. Whereas it is widely theorized that the universe has a natural tendency toward randomness and disorder (i.e., entropy), Dillard notes that writing's essence is to weave fragments into a system, to bring order to chaos. Hence writing may help keep the universe from falling apart. You may have noticed the same principle operating in your own life, though on a smaller scale. The more you learn about the world and the more you open yourself to what is around you, the more you are threatened by the confusion of it all, by what Joseph Comprone calls "the clash of contending facts and philosophies." In Writers on Writing, Comprone argues that one has to write, for writing provides the individual's "primary means of giving coherence and individual expression to the potential chaos of experience that intellect and learning create." If you take advantage of the liberal education that Guilford offers, you will certainly experience the clash...and thus the need to write. Writing can thereby liberate us. Plato suggests in his famous allegory of the cave -- which compares human life to a chained existence in a cave, where "reality" appears as shadows on the cave wall -- that we are all prisoners. The purpose of a liberal education, as the root liber indicates, is to free us, free us from inherited belief systems which are not truly our own, free us from self images which are no longer adequate, free us from external forces which seek to constrain us.
Writing, more than any other activity at college, enables you to fight the battle cummings refers to, enables you to free yourself, for in writing you act to define who you are and what you believe. Even more so than reading, writing enables you to take charge of your education. You survey competing possibilities and contrasting interpretations, synthesize them, then forge and articulate your own -- and share them with others. Novelist E. M. Forster once wrote, "how do I know what I think until I see what I say?" Writing makes it possible for us to know what we are thinking. By putting our thoughts on paper, we can see them -- and ourselves -- honestly and critically.
Join a Community of SeekersThrough writing you not only learn who you are but also make new knowledge which is important to the community at large. You are no longer practicing with the already known, as you likely were in secondary school. You are being invited to join the fellowship of minds which are committed to voyaging into the unknown -- to make discoveries, to finding new meanings, to broadening the scope of human understanding. Sound critical thinking, expressed in writing and helped by it, is the coin in this realm. To participate in the conversation of the intellectual community, you must write. And the dialect of this community is one which will require some growing. You will be forced to stretch linguistically, not simply because you will be learning new vocabulary and concepts but because the thinking and logic which you now express will be more sophisticated and rigorous than what you are used to. Stick with it. The more you write, the more comfortable you will become. You will enter the conversation, and your written products -- as communications from scholar to scholar -- will advance the learning of others, professors and students both.
Final ThoughtsSo there you have it -- some powerful reasons to write at Guilford. Before moving on, though, consider one last reason, arguably the most important of all; writing is exhilarating! It is language's symbol-making property which allows us both to experience the full range of human experience and to transcend it. As Chris Anderson suggests in Style as Argument, our joy --and our responsibility -- as human beings is "to push language to its limits, explore edges of expression, intensify and expand the power of words to reach the sublime and inexplicable." With writing we can all be artists, giving full vent to our creativity, propelling ourselves to thoughts and dreams that have never been thought or dreamed before. Writing...one of the truly great and free human activities! |
The Writing ZoneWorking Through the Paper: Diary of James Cook, First Voyage |