About writing - essay 1

The aim of writing.

From time to time, I feel compelled to write! To force this action, I buy a new notebook as a signal of my commitment. The topic appears on impulse, an idea planted like a seed in the brain by other readings or a question posed by any author. The intention is to become a fluent writer, not a professional one, but a better one. In other words, to achieve the third stage of knowledge-crafting proposed by (Kellogg, 2008) [1]. The task is complex, not easy, but it is the way forward I define for myself.

So, enrolling in writing made sense to me, and writing the first couple of pages is rewarding and feels good. Unfortunately, the process gets blurred, and the progress stops. I overthink what to write, then I misspell a word, or my vocabulary isn't developed enough to write what flows through my mind. These doubts are excuses enough to make me stop and not proceed. As soon as I start, I quit. The recently acquired notebook sits unattended on a desk around the home, among books I've forgotten over time. I've accumulated hundreds of books, an amazing anti-library: books I wish to read, topics I want to deepen my knowledge of. I tell myself, one day I will complete this reading.

The need to express myself or to organise my thoughts vanishes. What started as a phenomenal idea ends up as another unfinished project. I write this essay while I read some books and a few academic papers. All of them are noise that distracts me from thought to thought, but they are also food for my brain.

But why do I stop writing? Why does this bad behaviour need to be solved? Why does it impact my development?

The importance of writing during my adolescence

Writing was a tactic I used during my studies, and I started it in 8th grade. I've never been an excellent student; I would do the bare minimum to get grades just enough to progress to the next school year. But for some reason, my teacher bothered me on earlier exams. Having difficulty getting a passing grade - minimum 50 points (0 to 100) - meant I would be on the brink of being retained in the 8th grade by the end of the year. For no apparent reason, I took the initiative to open my textbook to literally copy, word by word, the selected chapters.

I don't remember what influenced me to do this, and I've applied it solely for history class. It was beneficial, and my grades jumped from the lower grades group to the top three in my class. This got well engraved in my brain because when the very first test was graded by the teacher, she entered the class, and before she dropped her briefcase on the desk, she asked, "Who is Paulo? Congratulations, you had the second-best grade in the class!"

What have I missed during the transition to the higher education phase?

During adolescence, one is expected to recall an idea read or learned and put it in writing with minimal thought and effort [2]. I used this tactic to improve my short-term memory in 1992 during my knowledge-telling stage (Kellogg, 2008).

Unfortunately, I did not successfully achieve the second stage, knowledge-transforming, in the earlier phases of my adulthood. I wasn't fully aware of it or why I needed it. It's expected that we can write a well-planned text, translating and reviewing ideas from what the authors meant in their texts(Kellogg, 2008). Being a very practical person, I opted early to enrol in engineering, since I could visualise, understand and apply rule-based knowledge and combine it to achieve an end, reproducing it through experiments or the production of artefacts.

Therefore, during my university years, I continued to use the knowledge-telling writing strategy to improve my short-term memory. It was enough to prepare for the exams that required more knowledge and information retrieval. It's easy to say my best grades were in practical and rule-based engineering classes, as I lacked the capacity to produce extended compositions in classes that required in-depth research of academic articles.

But now I'm aware that the second stage is knowledge-transforming: it expects me to produce extended texts that draw on readings from several authors, while translating and reviewing their ideas.

Reviewing and translating others' ideas helps deconstruct our thought process; writing is an analytical process. For Derrida, analysis values and objectives include decomposition, dissection, and reducing the whole to its simplest parts (Gunkel, 2021, p. 26) [3]. Writing is difficult for me because it challenges me to break down my thinking process - from what I read to what I understand - into its fundamental components.

So why do most courses not stress or present these knowledge stages clearly to their students? That would simplify these young adults' lives as they navigate essay writing in the years to come.

In conclusion, while my earlier contacts with writing were not as profound as they should be, I kept my interest in understanding the benefits of the process in learning, as well as in improving my thinking process. As there is much more to add to this essay topic, to ensure I write and publish continuously, I decided to split it into several parts. This avoids discarding what I've achieved so far. The initial essay title was "Why I promise to myself I will write?", but once I decided to break it into pieces, I could analyse each initial idea on its own. I'll be free to evolve the topic as this goes.

[1]: "In the most advanced stage of knowledge-crafting, the writer is able to hold in mind the author’s ideas, the words of the text itself, and the imagined reader’s interpretation of the text." (Kellogg, 2008, pp. 5–5)

[2]: It takes at least two decades of maturation, instruction, and training to advance from (1) the beginner's stage of using writing to tell what one knows. (Kellogg, 2008, pp. 3–3)

[3]: Derrida is quite direct and empathic on this point. The process, values, and objectives of analysis - namely, decomposition, dissection, and reduction of some larger whole into its simple, fundamental components. (Gunkel, 2021, p. 26)