Writing as Thinking

Writing as Thinking

        Pondering the discussions had last week there were some interesting points and angles at which to attack the writing problem in the freshman composition classroom. However, the one I attached to was the idea that teaching writing is an equivalent to teaching thinking. If we take in to account our primary utterance, speech, and then consider it as opposed to our secondary utterance, writing, it makes sense that writing would equate thinking to some extent. Primary utterances come as a flow, a stream of consciousness is what it's referred to mostly. Now, there is a particular style of writing that tries to emulate the primary utterance of speech (stream of consciousness), but it always comes off as hard to read and stilted to some extent. Reading someone's thoughts as they come out of their mind and are written down is almost always perceived as odd or off-putting. That being said, the teaching of how to organize one's thoughts on a page to deliver to another person should be equated to teaching that person how to think.

        For example, if a student is able to organize his/her thoughts on a page. That act of teaching the organization, the revision, the eventual finding of the voice and style, all of these things lead the student to become a better thinker. A better thinker in the sense that they can read another person's writing more critically than if we have them freewrite their own thoughts. The idea of a freewrite is for a student to get ideas on a page, not necessarily to get those ideas in a good organization or to be criticized by another. I've always seen freewriting as a way to get the student in the writing mood. Let's be honest, there is always a mood related to writing. Teaching composition teaches a student how to critically look at his/her self and then take that critical eye and turn it on other works more readily than if they had never encountered it. Some of the students have an innate or inherent knowledge on this subject already, but most do not. There is the complication on how to apply some type of standard way of teaching writing that applies to all, but that is in my opinion, almost impossible. Every class takes a different approach, but in each approach the student community the instructor is responsible for is taking on a critical thinking approach directly related to writing and the instructor is able to take his/her own critical eye and turn it in on his/her pedagogy. The fostering of the critical eye is how writing and thinking can be used in relation to one another to create a knowledge making environment.