To Learn About It, Write About It

Recently I was reading Richard Dowis’ excellent book, The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write One – How to Deliver It, and I read something very wise that pertains directly to self-education and learning. In a section of the book that discusses researching when writing speeches, he bolsters an assertion I’ve made for years – that a great way to learn something thoroughly is to write about it. It’s difficult to avoid deeper understanding of a topic if you need to create cogent, clear writing about that topic. Dowis offered, in part, “Simply said, writing makes you think.” He continues, “Writing forces you to think in specifics. It forces you to think in a directed way.”

My father espouses this learning strategy and suggested it to me as a child. My father is a master self-educator and he encouraged those skills in me. I’m grateful.

Writing, in this case, doesn’t need to be publishing worthy. It doesn’t really even need to be good writing if the purpose is only to learn about something in a more organized, deeper and thoughtful way. The goal isn’t great writing necessarily, but rather coming to a deeper understanding of a topic of interest. I recall someone referring to this as “low stakes” writing, and it is. You’ve got nothing to lose, but a lot to gain by using the strategy of writing about a topic to learn it well.

The task of writing encourages the identification and organization of ideas, information and insights (I call them the three i’s) in a way not easily possible by passively reading, viewing or listening to arrive at the same ideas, information and insights. And writing fosters yet one more important aspect to learning. Within the writing process you begin to not just take on another person’s insights and analysis, but you create your own that are uniquely yours (a sign of true learning). You absorb and assess the stuff you learn from external sources, but writing mixes up the stew to produce an interconnectedness among the ideas, information and insights to produce your individual perspective and understanding.

So the next time you want to learn something, consider writing about it. If you don’t consider yourself a good writer, don’t worry. That’s not the point. The point is to learn. Of course, the more you write the better a writer you become. Not a bad added benefit.