Working on Writing While Not Thinking about Writing - Term paper / research paper writing service

You will help your writing if you can find occasions when the job you are doing matters a lot but the quality of the writing doesn't matter at all -- occasions when you pay no attention to the glass and look only at the scene beyond it. A good example is if you are trying to make up your mind about which of two jobs to take and after sitting and stewing and not getting anywhere for a few days, you finally decide to spend a couple of hours writing out all your thoughts and feelings. You don't try to make an orderly presentation or argument, you just write and write until your thoughts and feelings are on paper. The process gets you unstuck. At first, you lean in your writing toward one job and start to get excited about it, then toward the other. But it isn't mere vacillation as it was when you were just thinking. Writing somehow makes it into a working through process so there is development, growth, progress.It's a great relief to write seriously and usefully, without thinking about your writing. And it helps the rest of your writing. It makes you more comfortable putting words on paper and it makes those words more natural and lively. In this brief page, I Will suggest a few more occasions when you can work on your writing while you are getting other jobs done. The door opens. In comes Abby, crying. "Wah meeg blah egg rogg wee rogg. "What happened?" "Wah meeg blah egg rogg wee rogg." "What happened? I can't understand you." "Wah meeg blah egg rogg wee rogg." "Benjy threw a rock at you?" "Wah meeg blah egg rogg wee rogg." "You ate a rock?" "Uh huh." While Abby fails to communicate, I examine her language with all my attention. As soon as minimal communication occurs, I ignore her language and all my attention slides through it, past it, to the meaning, to the nonlinguistic reality, to the question of whether to call the hospital. When the glass is fogged up, we look at the glass. The glass is all we can see. As soon as it gets unfogged, we ignore it and see through it to the scene outside.

		• If you are facing a difficult dilemma as in the example above, write out your thoughts and feelings as quickly but as fully as they occur to you. Don't just make lists of reasons for and against (except perhaps at the end). Follow threads of thought and feeling where they lead.
		• If you want to digest and remember what you are reading, try writing about it instead of taking notes. Stop periodically -- at the end of each page or when something important strikes you -and simply write about what you have read and your reactions to it. This procedure may make you nervous at first because you can't "cover" as many points or make something as neatly organized as when you take notes. But you will remember more. Perfectly organized notes that cover everything are beautiful, but they live on paper, not in your mind. The same procedure is helpful for lectures. You will learn more if you take no notes at all and instead put all your attention into listening; then at the end sit and write for ten or fifteen minutes about what you have heard and what it means to you.
		• If you have to give a talk or speech, work out what you want to say by writing out trains of thought instead of sitting there trying to work it out inside your head and just writing down mere words or phrases for your notes. You'll think better and get your thoughts clearer in your head. After you write you may still want some notes to speak from, but you can make them quickly and they will be briefer because they are just small notations to remind you of what you've figured out. The process of writing and of using shorter notes will probably enable you to talk in a more relaxed way and make better contact with your audience.
		• Keep a journal. Explore different ways of doing so: not just what happened, but thoughts, feelings, portraits, snatches of conversation, quotations; not just by writing at the end of the day or week, but intermittently at odd times of the day. Try, for example, taking a moment at the beginning of the day (as you sit down to your desk or after breakfast or on the bus) and write about what you want to accomplish that day or about the spirit or attitude you want to maintain. One particularly illuminating way to keep a journal -- to explore not just the present but the shape of your whole life -- has been developed by Ira Progoff. (See At a journal Workshop, New York, 1975.) Some people find it a treat to write in an elegantly bound journal with fine paper -- a sensual event. But for many others this adds the pressure to write nicely, to make it memorable, even to think about readers and this makes writing more of an ordeal. If you make your journal a folder rather than a book, you can write on whatever paper comes to hand at odd moments in the day when a thought strikes you.
		• Write informal notes to people when a thought strikes you. "Dear Byron, I appreciated the way you ran that meeting. It helped a lot that you told that story about yourself. I was grateful that you got us back on the agenda when we were all sidetracked. The troops seemed restless today. I think you are doing a terrific job." Even when you see someone frequently, sometimes it's easier to get something across on paper than by talking. When it's appreciation you want to express, sometimes the other person is too self-conscious and blots out what you say with protests. ("Oh no, actually I've screwed up about this and that.") And when you've finally decided to tell someone how he is frustrating or hurting you, sometimes he blots you out with arguments or excuses. If your goal, in short, is to make someone hear what you are saying, often you do better writing words on paper than trying to have a conversation. Even nonstop uncareful writing.
		• Write informal letters. Of course it seems easier to call; or to wait till next month when you will see the person. But in addition to the good practice in writing, letters work better in certain ways than conversations. Often it takes the leisure, privacy, and reflectiveness of writing to permit you to tell him what's important: perhaps deep feelings you have about him or a delicate, tentative
	train of thought. And often you give your reader much more of the texture of your life in writing than you give on the phone or even in talking. You describe better that day in the woods or what struck you as you were walking to work. The uninterrupted monologue of writing permits you to tell what it was really like, to say what you really felt, to finish the whole story, instead of so often being sidetracked by the give and take of conversation.

. . .There are certain times in the natural cycle of any enterprise -- a job, a trip, a relationship, a course of study, a writing task -- when it is useful to stop and write out some of your thoughts and feelings.

	• At the start. When you are starting a new job or course of study, for example, you will do much better if you sit down and write out your hopes and expectations and fears about what it's going to be like. If you write fast and freely you will discover important assumptions and feelings. I wonder when this one will end." "If it's the right job for me, I'll love every minute." "School learning can't be useful and it's got to be boring." The process of writing out your goals helps you in particular to come closer actually to achieving some of them, instead of being vaguely hopeful for a while and then vaguely disappointed. Writing helps you see which goals are actually attainable and which are unrealistic traps. You can see which ones conflict with which others. Try to zero in on a few important goals and force yourself to specify the first concrete steps. I have to find so and so's phone number." I have to get a pair of waterproof boots."
	• Stuck points. When you are stuck at any task, you can often get going again by writing down everything that is going on. When did things start to go wrong? How would you describe the problem from where you now sit? Tell the sequence of events inside you; outside you. Even if this writing doesn't solve the problem, it heightens your awareness of this kind of problem so that next time you'll notice it sooner and deal with it better.
	• Breakthroughs. It's such a relief to get out of a jam that you just want to forge ahead. But if you use some of that relief to fuel a short writing-break to tell yourself what you did right or what the necessary ingredients seemed to be -- while it's fresh in your mind -- you will be more in charge next time and not just have to trust luck.

• Final reflections. At the end of a job or a series of meetings or a day, try writing briefly about what you did well and what you could have done better. This kind of conscious reflective writing can mean the difference between growing and just continuing to function at the same level. Much good learning I see here at The Evergreen State College comes from students having to write a reflection on what they have learned and how they learned it at the end of each quarter of study.

. . .Use writing to aid group process.

	• At the start of a taskforce or series of meetings, it helps people to work together if you can get everyone to take a couple of moments to write about what they hope, think, and fear will happen, and then either to share these pieces of very informal writing or to speak briefly on the basis of them. Of course, people will disagree. "I'm looking forward to a close-knit comfortable friendly time." "I'm looking forward to some good knockdown dragout arguments." But it's a great benefit if these can be public right at the start. Some disagreements can actually be negotiated. Others can at least be accepted with realism. A few people may realize they've come to the wrong place and leave. When expectations are left unexpressed and the conflicts come as a surprise, it leads to that familiar pattern in group functioning where people have high hopes at the start and then gradually withdraw their involvement as they get disappointed -- sometimes even sabotaging the enterprise as they pull out.
	• If, in the middle of a meeting or seminar, a particularly hard question comes up, it is helpful to have everyone just write in an exploratory way for five or ten minutes. People will have better ideas. Like brainstorming, writing provides safety for exploring, but it doesn't take so much time. And if some people are habitually quiet so that you lose the benefit of their thinking and their point of view, it's probable that they want more time and privacy to reflect a moment on their first thoughts and check that they are not silly or obvious. Trying to talk and think at the same time is the bane of most meetings: some people love to do it and speak badly and too much; others are reluctant to do it, so the group loses their contribution. (If those who work with you don't want to interrupt a meeting for reflective freewriting you can just tune out and do it yourself.)

• When a meeting ends, especially if the group will continue to meet in the future, it's useful to take just a few moments for everyone to write down a couple of perceptions about what was helpful and not so helpful about the process (for example, the agenda was well planned; someone was particularly good at formulating an issue; someone else kept interrupting). These perceptions can be quickly shared either on paper or in brief comments. No need necessarily to discuss them. Matters usually improve gradually by themselves through the airing of these perceptions. The goal is not to figure out the absolute truth, but to learn how people experienced things.

Obviously these writing tasks I propose for meetings could be performed by speaking rather than writing, and it is easy to assume that speaking is always more authentic, immediate, and genuine than writing. But if, for example, you decide to end a meeting with a few minutes of spoken feedback from everyone about the process, you will find that people often blather and don't really say what is on their mind. "I enjoyed the meeting. I think it would help a lot if we all tried to stick to the subject a bit more." If the person who said that had five minutes to write his thoughts down first, he would be much more likely to come out and say, "Larry, I think you are making it harder for us to get our work done because you keep interrupting people before they are finished, and when you talk you make long speeches. Please stop doing that." The reason for the difference is interesting. If someone asks you to speak your perceptions in a group, you have to do three jobs at once: figure out what you think; figure out how to say it so others Will understand; and also figure out whether you want to say it (especially if it is controversial or personal). Trying to do all three at once in front of an audience is difficult, and so you often solve the difficulty by deciding not to say anything at all. When you have the privacy to collect your thoughts in writing, however, you often find the courage to share a thought which, while you were writing it out, you assumed you could not share. Seeing your thought on paper somehow helps you see that it's not such a hard thing to say, not such a big deal -- makes it easier to say to yourself, I don't need to beat around the bush. It's time someone was blunt with Larry about his behavior in meetings." . . . People usually assume that writing is always meant to communicate with others. When you use it that way you must think very carefully about it as writing. "Will these words really mean to the reader what they mean to me? Will they have the effect I assume they will have?" But writing is also very useful as a way to work out your thoughts and feelings for yourself alone. When you use it in this way as a process of exploration and discovery, you don't have to think carefully about it as writing (however carefully you may think about the matter you are exploring). Oddly enough, writing as exploration usually helps your writing as communication.

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