10.4: Skillful Writing Is Hard

Writing Is Hard

I hope I’ve at least opened the possibility that

• You are in fact going to have to write things in your post-college future,
• The things you’ll very often have to write will be attempts to persuade people to change their thinking and do a thing for you, and
• Persuasion is difficult, and we need all the practice we can get before we fly from our undergraduate nest.

You know what else is very difficult? Writing. Even harder? Writing well. And definitely writing well in support of getting that thing you want and need.

For proof that writing is hard, consider that there are few activities we procrastinate more than writing. Most people will use a toothbrush to clean the bathroom they share with six roommates sooner than tackle a high-stakes writing project; they will get two root canals and do their back taxes before they’ll sit down to write a persuasive argument.

And that’s for good reason. Our brains rebel from the blank page; the higher the stakes, the more our brains rebel. After all, the writing task demands all parts of the brain to kick into overdrive at once. You need logic; you need to consider the audience and the situation; you need to organize your thinking and translate that thinking to black symbols on a white page; you need to attend to the order and sequence of those black symbols in every way, from grammar to the active voice to transitions to openers and closers; you need research and citations and formatting and more. And at the exact same time, you need to activate the creative part of your brain; to write anything, no matter how boring, is truly an act of creation, because the thing (an essay, a cover letter, a please-take-me-back-I’m-so-sorry email) literally doesn’t exist until you create it. It’s just you and that blank page and your cursor taunting you with every blink. And because none of us are born writers, you have to work at it. You have to practice.

And here again, like magic, you find yourself in a class equally devoted to that challenging enterprise. So while our thematic focus in this writing class is persuasion and critical thinking, we’re also, of course, focused on your writing itself—voice, tone, style, concision, precision, all of it.

What follows in this text on your screen is about half-and-half: half devoted to analyzing our own and others’ persuasion techniques and half to critical thinking and writing strategies—and all about their constant and necessary overlap. We are going to infuse you with tools to take on that blank page with laser-focused, tried-and-true strategies and, crucially, with an added dose of confidence: “I know I have the necessary tools in my bag to move through this prewriting anxiety phase and produce something that will be, after revision, not just well written but also highly persuasive.”

We’ve curated this text for a persuasion, critical thinking, and writing class specifically. And not for nothing, your instructor has devoted their professional life to helping people write well. If you want to get your money’s worth this term or if you just want to stick it to the powers that be as you jump through this particular hoop, why not take full advantage of these two resources at your disposal while you still can?