Getting Organized
Getting Organized: Word by Word
Peter de Jager
The benefits of writing are perhaps one of civilized society’s best kept secrets. If you have no idea what I’m ‘talking’ about, then don’t worry, you’re about to get initiated into a very private club. If you are a writer, and object to me divulging these well kept secrets to the masses, then you’re out of luck, I’ve got control of the pen (or keyboard in this case) and I’m in control.
Before we talk about the benefits, a short exploration of the obstacles stopping most people from writing is in order. For years, writing anything, whether it was a school paper, a trip report, a book review or an employee appraisal was a distasteful, burdensome task. That view of writing, unfortunately, kept me from doing very much of it. It took me a score of years to figure what I was doing wrong. Once I did that, though, writing became instantly easy.
Here’s how most of us write. We put a few words down on paper, perhaps a sentence or two and then we go back and edit. Our goal of course is perfection. If we see something wrong, we’ve got this overriding compulsion to fix it – now! Several hours later, we might, if we’re lucky, have one paragraph to show for our efforts (that, and the beginnings of a heart attack or a stroke). Writing this way isn’t very pleasant.
Writing is a judicious combination of two personas, each possessing important and necessary skills. The first fellow is the creative force, the one that comes up with the ideas, determines the flow and the tone of the words and the one that’s the most fun. The other beast is from the dark side, the editor (sorry Susan), the bureaucrat, the censor, the perfectionist, the nudge. Allowing both of these to work together is a lost cause. The editor will never have enough to work with, and the muse will cower in the corner afraid to even try to find the right words.
The first and key secret to writing is to write and make no attempt to edit while writing. You can let the editor out of the cage once the article is done; until then, though, find a way to imprison the mental editor until you’re finished putting the words on paper. Ignore spelling erroz and forget fixing errors grammatical. Leave all of this until you’re done getting the ideas on paper. Then, and only then, do you unleash the internal editor with blood red pen and snide comments about your intelligence and upbringing.
Once you can write, you’ll begin to reap some of the substantial benefits. Here are the two I find most useful:
- Writing facilitates organized thought – The nature of writing forces us to organize what we want to communicate. Writing/reading is a linear activity. No matter how much I want to tell you, I can only do it one word, one idea at a time. Putting words on paper forces me to prioritize everything that I want to communicate. To perform this prioritization, I must first sift through everything I might communicate, something we seldom do unless we’re writing.
- We know much more than we think we do – For those who don’t write, this is going to sound just a little bit strange. For those who do write, I suspect I’m confirming a pleasant little secret. When we write, we’re performing something very different from our day-to-day use of spoken language. We’re choosing each word with care, and thinking deeply about our subject matter. However it works (and I make no pretense of truly understanding the process), we develop deeper insights into the topic we’re exploring – to the point where, when we re-read our written material months or years later, we learn consciously what we must have known unconsciously when we wrote the piece in the first place.
Is writing a management tool? Only if managers need to organize their thoughts and gain insights to what they do for a living. Other than that, writing is a caveman’s trick of scratching marks on the walls of dark caves. MW
From the January 2007 issue of Municipal World
Check out Peter de Jager’s bio on the Municipal World website.