How Writing Works

A field guide to effective writing

Roslyn Petelin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476408
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is an engaging and practical introduction to the elements of grammar, sentence structure, and style that you need to write well across a range of academic, creative, and professional contexts, deftly combining practical strategies with scholarly principles.

The second edition includes updated material based on a longstanding commitment to writing and to best international practice. It includes advice on reading; language; grammar and style; structuring; designing; paragraphing; punctuation; workplace and academic documents; digital writing for social media; and revising, editing, and proofreading.

How Writing Works should be on the desk of everyone who needs to write: students, professionals in all fields, and creative writers. It is an essential handbook for working writers and writing workers in the contemporary writing-reliant workplace.

The accompanying companion website includes video interviews and presentations from leading grammarians including Professor David Crystal and Professor Geoff Pullum, in addition to online quizzes and activities to support readers' learning.

CHAPTER 1 How writing works

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179344-1

Roslyn Petelin

You have to let words talk to words.

Ken Macrorie

Writing in our contemporary information society

Before writing was invented, speaking was the main mode of communication. And while orality—a term derived from the Latin word for the mouth—was central to culture before the invention of writing, writing has become absolutely central to contemporary culture. Ong defines culturally literate beings as ‘those whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of the powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing’. ‘Writing’, he says, ‘has transformed human consciousness’ (1982, p. 78).

These days, everyone’s a writer—in social, educational, and professional spaces (Pullum, 2014; Yagoda, 2013). Writing is a mass daily experience (Brandt, 2015). In 2020, Zizikes reported that, globally, about 3.5 billion people are active social media participants, posting, during a typical day, 500 million tweets and over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content.

In a presentation on YouTube, workplace-writing researcher Professor Deborah Brandt describes how, over the past 50 or 60 years, the world economy has shifted from a base in manufacturing goods to a base in manufacturing services, that is, knowledge, ideas, data, and information. She says: ‘as a consequence of this shift, writing has become the work of our time’ (2012). Living in the twenty-first century entails living in a service-oriented information society— known as ‘the knowledge economy’. Writing is at the heart of this knowledge economy: it is ubiquitous, demanding ever greater levels of verbal sophistication.

The rise and rise of the internet in our digital era has dramatically upped the ante. Employers want graduates who are problem-solvers—variously called ‘gold-collar workers’, ‘knowledge workers’, and ‘information architects’—that is, graduates who can research, analyse, write, and edit, and who are critical and creative thinkers with technological competence and design sensibility.

Contemporary government, business, education, and industry rely on writing. I can think of no disciplines or professions that aren’t critically reliant on the researching, writing, and editing nexus. The BBC reported a research project by the Society for Human Resource Management that found ‘two crucial skills lacking in US college graduates both involve . . . writing’ (Nguyen, 2015). Reports in Australia and the UK record the same problem.

Writing is at the centre of all disciplines and professions. We are often judged on the quality of our writing, so it’s essential to strive for professionalism. You’ll need to write well to succeed in your studies and to have a great career path in whatever profession you enter. The workplace requires a strong grasp of words, grammar, and sentence structure—what is widely regarded as Standard English. Standard English is rather an elastic term, but English holds its place as the language of power and prestige in much of the world.

What is writing?

Writing is a process in which thinking and learning take place. This process is known as the writing–thinking–learning connection. It’s a process that results in a communicative product that conforms to grammatical, syntactical, mechanical, and genre conventions. Importantly, writing also performs recognisable social functions that have increased in importance with the rise of social media. We live in what has been called a ‘participatory society’, where social media consistently provide us with opportunities to interact in global conversations.

People often think that they can’t begin to write until they’ve decided what they want to say, but writing well is a complex skill that develops slowly over time and not necessarily in a linear fashion. Experienced writers know that writing is a difficult, complex, time-consuming, recursive process. They draft so that they can revise (‘re-see’) what they have written. Put another way, they write with the intention of revising. They write knowing that it’s easier to correct than to create, confident that once words are on the page or on the computer screen, those words will ‘talk to’ other words.

In his influential book Style: Toward clarity and grace, Joseph Williams uses a cookbook analogy to explain that ‘knowing the ingredients and knowing how to use them is the difference between reading cookbooks and Cooking’. Williams says that ‘describing a few of the devices that some graceful writers use . . . is about as useful as listing the ingredients of the bouillabaisse of a great cook and then expecting anyone to make it’ (1995, p. 153). He points out that writing success is highly dependent on learning and adapting to the often implicit rules and genre conventions of a discourse community— that is, of the context in which writing takes place.

To understand the conventions, writers need excellent briefing and excellent exemplars to imitate, or, better still, to emulate. They need to be able to identify errors that characterise non-standard English (see Chapter 4). They need to be able to identify rectifiable weaknesses. They need to know how to read for substance and subtext. They need to be able to discern perspectives, inaccuracies, biases, gaps, and blind spots. They need to be able to identify and analyse the rhetorical and stylistic devices that accomplished writers use. They need to be able to analyse, evaluate, and select information, and structure and synthesise it into logical, meaningful, economical, persuasive prose of their own. Much of this competence will come from writing instruction by knowledgeable teachers, but it also comes from the processes of reading and writing.

Vocation or avocation?

Do you aspire to be a writer? Are you a writer already? Do you regard writing as a vocation or an avocation, or, perhaps, both? A vocation—from the Latin verb vocare, ‘to call’—is an occupation, a calling. It’s roughly synonymous with ‘career’ or ‘profession’. An avocation is an activity that one engages in for pleasure outside one’s main occupation.

So we have the writer Anton Chekhov, who was a physician by vocation; the poet William Carlos Williams, who was a paediatrician; the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin, who was a librarian; the novelist Salley Vickers, who is a psychoanalyst; the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who was a painter; the novelist Joseph Conrad, who was a sea captain; and the poet Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance executive. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle practised as a medical doctor. T.S. Eliot was a banker. As Robert McCrum (2012) notes in his article ‘Against type: Writers with other careers’, ‘There is a lot to be said for writers who don’t just write’.

The American poet Robert Frost moved from a vocation, university teaching, to his avocation, poetry, but declared their intertwining in the final stanza of his poem ‘Two tramps in mud time’:

But yield who will to their separation,My object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sight.

Whether writing is your vocation or avocation, a great deal of your success in life will hinge on whether you can communicate effectively, and, if you can embrace and even become excited about the range of possibilities writing well opens up, it will add pleasure to and enrich your life.

Writing in the workplace

Some years ago, I used the terms ‘working writer’ and ‘writing worker’ to distinguish between professionally trained writers (career writers) and those who are not necessarily trained as professional writers but whose jobs require them to write (Petelin, 2002).

The working writers are journalists, reviewers, copywriters, novelists, scriptwriters, playwrights, poets, bloggers, digital content creators, technical writers, etc. The writing workers are lawyers, accountants, marketers, economists, managers, engineers, architects, nurses, technologists, scientists, public affairs and information officers, researchers, software developers, etc.

Although writing is a mainstream activity in most professions and an employee’s writing ability is likely to be critical to their career path, many of those who write in the workplace regard writing as marginal; they do not see it as essential to their working lives. They are not reflective about its importance because writing is often a rather invisible activity in organisations. Its importance in organisations often goes unnoticed until there’s a document-related crisis. Untrained writers think that because they can talk they can write. That’s not necessarily so. In most Australian and British universities, writing is under-taught, under-valued, and under-researched. Writing has a higher profile in American universities, where there is a long tradition of rhetoric and composition at undergraduate level.

Writing is feared by many workers who are not hired as writers but find that a substantial part of their day, and sometimes their night, is spent writing. Such a worker may not consider themselves to be a writer by profession, but they find that they are one by default. As I mentioned earlier, Brandt’s North American research on literacy in the workplace (2015, p. 7) revealed an intensifying use of writing for work. These writing workers need to know about the writing– thinking–learning connection.

The writing–thinking–learning connection

Language scholars have long argued that humans find meaning in the world by exploring it through their own use of language. Many creative writers testify that they don’t know what they’re thinking until they start writing about it. Many professional writers would say the same. This is what the English novelist E.M. Forster had to say: ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ In an essay in The New York Times Book Review Joan Didion, the American writer, said: ‘Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write’ (1976).

When people write about something, they understand and learn it better. That’s why it’s called the writing–thinking–learning connection. By exploiting this interdependence between writing, thinking, and learning, you will be able to use writing as a tool to more effectively think, learn, and communicate, both at university and in the workplace. Writing creates ideas. We get to know the world through language. We write to find out what we want to say. Writing is epistemic: it constructs/creates knowledge. As the American scholar T.Y. Booth explains:

The assumption that composing is primarily or essentially a matter of getting clearly in mind what we want to say, and then finding the words which will recall those meanings and make them available to others, is possibly the single most serious obstacle for most people all through the composing process.

(1986, p. 455)

When we start to put words on the page or on the screen, we discover what we are really thinking much more clearly than when we try to mentally visualise our topic before we write. We think about what we have learned and learn about how we think, which makes the whole process circular and generative.

The relationship between observing and writing is not a one-way traffic: the more acutely and passionately one observes, the more there is that feels worth recording, yes; but conversely the more one becomes committed to such writing, the more active—as a consequence—one’s observings become . . . The world that is verbalized is more interesting potentially than the world that remains unverbalized.

(Fulwiler, 1987, p. 37)

Each element—thinking and learning—is both a cause and an effect of the other. Therefore, start to appreciate writing as an essential key to unlocking thinking and learning.

How does writing bring about learning?

1. Writing gives concrete form to ideas.
2. Pursuing an idea through writing requires us to think in a focused way.
3. Writing out thoughts allows us to move beyond the trivial and immediate to the more complex and significant.
4. Rewriting demands an internal monologue on the ideas under consideration about phrasing, connections, ‘signposts’, inclusions, exclusions, and structure.

Two well-known writers have this to say: Stephen King notes that ‘Writing is refined thinking’ (2001, p. 131), and Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said, ‘If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you’.

Keeping a journal

One way to make thinking and learning central to your writing and to exploit their connection is to keep a journal/notebook/log/diary/ day book—what was once called a ‘commonplace book’ and even more quaintly, a vade mecum. Many professionals keep a journal in the form of a field notebook in which they record observations, notes of conversations, reflections on actions they have carried out, articles and books they have read, insights they have reached, etc. Management Professor Nancy Adler headed an article in the Harvard Business Rev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• CHAPTER 1 How writing works
• CHAPTER 2 How reading works
• CHAPTER 3 How words work
• CHAPTER 4 How sentences and content words work
• CHAPTER 5 How structure words and paragraphs work
• CHAPTER 6 How punctuation works
• CHAPTER 7 How structure and design work
• CHAPTER 8 How genres and workplace documents work
• CHAPTER 9 How academic research and writing work
• CHAPTER 10 How digital writing works
• CHAPTER 11 How revising, editing, and proofreading work
• Acknowledgements
• Answers to the activities
• References
• Index