Writing to Learn - William Zinsser

 

William Zinsser's thirty-year-old Writing to Learn has fundamentally changed the way I read, and I only wish I'd found it sooner than I did. As it turns out, this is not so much a book on how to write well, as it is a book about why you should write more - and how big a difference developing that one habit can make in your life. 

For me, the primary takeaway from Writing to Learn is that the act of writing forces the writer/reader to focus his mind and to organize his thoughts to such a degree that, as Zinsser puts it, "we write to find out what we know and what we want to say." It takes a little extra effort and time to follow Zinnser's suggestion, but the enormous payoff at the end makes it all worthwhile. Readers who take the time to write short reviews of the books they've read already know that they remember those books they write about far longer than the ones they don't take the time to review (even if the resulting review or summary is only for their personal use).  

Zinsser convinced me to take it one step farther than just sitting down to write a review within a few hours of having finished a book. I often find myself a little befuddled while reading a complicated novel, one with multiple plots and numerous characters, for instance, or when reading detailed nonfiction. When that happens, I find myself rereading whole pages or sections of a book (sometimes more than once) to see what I've missed, but even then I'm often still not satisfied that I got the author's point. Instead of all of that rereading, thanks to Zinsser, I've learned to slow down long enough to write about what I've just read, and the results have surprised me. 

Zinsser tells me that's because:

"Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know - and what we don't know - about whatever we're trying to learn."

 And the good news is that the extra effort (it's more of a timing change than anything else for those of us who write about what we read) has not slowed my reading pace at all. If anything, I'm finding that it comes closer to speeding up my reading rather than to putting the brakes to it because I'm reading as many books now as I ever have - and remembering much more of what I've read. 

But that's not why Zinsser wrote Writing to Learn. His main message is that students should be required to "write across the curriculum" no matter what discipline they are studying. By doing so, they will more completely understand whatever lesson within their discipline they are studying. Math students should be able to write about solutions and why they work, science students should be able to explain to complete novices what they are learning; anthropologists should be able to make their observations truly comprehensible to all of us; even music students should be able to make music theory comprehensible to the rest of us. And in the process, those students will learn as much as we who read their work will learn. They are likely even to come away with new ideas of their own.

Writing to Learn is not a long book, coming in at just under 200 pages if I remember correctly. And, as many readers of the book have pointed out, Part 2 is filled with many relatively long examples of excellent writing from several different disciplines. At first, I was a little put off by how many examples Zinsser uses, but when I realized all of a sudden just how much information I was absorbing by reading in disciplines I previously had no interest in, or had always before been intimidated by, I understood why he included them. Those examples reinforce Zinsser's message so nicely that I suggest you read them even thought the book makes perfect sense without them. 

Zinsser says it best:

"Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It's a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism - pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor - for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly."

William Zinsser (1922-2015)