WHAT IS MEANT BY WRITING...

5 DEFINITIONS OF WRITING

1. Writing is a process as well as a product. The final text is only the end result, and how you get there is just as important as where you end up. Good writers are good, not because they sit down and write effortlessly, turning out beautiful sentences without sweat. They are good because they believe that eventually, after lots of work and time and discarded drafts, they will come up with something worth a reader's attention.

2. Writing is discovery. You do not write because you know what you think; you write to find out what you think. And the more you write and re-write, the clearer and more interesting your thinking becomes.

3. Writing is social. You may feel that you have to be alone to write, and this may be physically true. But your writing is saturated with the presence of others: your society, your culture, and your readers. Writing is not complete until it has reached, physically and intellectually, the audience for whom it was intended. As Ezra Pound put it, writing means that "You not only get a thing off your own chest, but you get it into someone else's." Your enrollment in a composition course makes you an important contributing member of a supportive, committed writing community.

4. Writing is self-taught. You learn to write by doing it, not by listening to somebody tell you about it. In this way it is like learning to ride a bike: although it helps to have someone hold the handlebars the first few times, the best way to get good at it is to ride every day.

5. Writing is a series of choices. Most people who fear writing see it as a confusing maze of rules they are in danger of breaking: rules like "Never begin a sentence with 'And,'" "Don't use 'I' in formal writing," "Write complete sentences, not fragments." But if writing were only a set of rules, learning to write effectively would be as easy as mastering the multiplication tables. Effective writers don't just follow rules--they also make choices, after thinking long and hard about the consequences of those choices. And that is why good writing is always interesting.