Entering the Conversation

What are the authors saying writing is?

The main point that the authors of this piece are trying to deliver is that writing should follow a structured line of logic in the way it communicates to the reader. The easiest and most basic way to teach this idea is to have young writers adapt to and implement the use of a template. By using a template or formula to guide your writing, you can learn to deliver your thoughts in a clear and concise manner which is understandable to the reader. They are also trying to encourage and impress upon the reader that writing should be a presentation of your own personal ideas, whether they agree, disagree or have certain elements of both to the standard way of thinking. The piece explains how writing should be a response that presents your own ideas to the reader about other individual's views on a certain issue, that your writing should enter into the debate and add your own beliefs about it. It also shows how using this template is both effective, easy to understand and that it also does not stifle one's creative development with their writing. Essentially, writing should be a presentation of your own ideas into an active debate, hopefully making an impact with your philosophies, whether great or small.


What do you think writing is?

Writing is a tangible expression of your thought patterns. In several aspects, I agree with what the authors are saying in this piece. I believe that writing should be fresh and controversial. Writing should ignite debate and the prompting of new and revolutionary ideas that influence or revise our former ways of thinking. If all individuals believed in their ideas and allowed them to be followed to their final conclusion, the entire world would be changed by one person's differing mind. It requires only the passion of one's beliefs to keep others captivated through reading your ideas, and then the world can come to their own conclusion concerning your philosophies are.

If writers use the safe formula of regurgitating respected or widely believed viewpoints, writing becomes stale and vapid. People don't read to be reinformed of what they already know; reading should be an act of engagement, of going on a journey, examining the writer's logic and at the end having the "aha" moment of a lightbulb going off in their head. It's an experience of stepping into another's shoes for a moment, viewing the world from their eyes, and in that you have become someone you no longer were. The powerful element of knowledge is what keeps the world constantly revising, redrafting and becoming more perfect. If all an individual ever does is does not seek to present their own line of logic, the world will have lost a complete and separate mind, a mind which views the world in a way entirely different from everyone else. The writer cannot allow fear of rejection to influence the pouring of his mind, the writer can only trust upon their own muse to create the music of their soul viewable to the entire world.