Writing is a mystery, really.It goes on in our heads as thinking.
But if we could have our thoughts automatically transcribed onto paper, would that be better than forming each word with a pen, or typing it on a keyboard?
Not the way I write.I don’t get fully formed sentences in my thoughts, but require the process of seeing words on paper or a computer screen to help me get to the next word and the next sentence.
Years ago when I worked at Smith, Slingerland, Trauth & Holtz one summer, I taught myself the official Gregg shorthand from a book.I had to because I had applied for a secretarial job and to do it you were required to take dictation.The company didn’t know, when they hired me, that I had never done it before.
Who would apply for a legal secretary’s job back then without knowing shorthand?
So I was slow at first, and had to write some of the words out in longhand when I didn’t know the symbols needed to produce them.
I enjoyed learning the shorthand, though, and used it for another secretarial job I got on another summer break.
Today I can’t think of even one shorthand symbol I used to know.
I just tried to write some, but they look like ordinary squiggly lines.And now I feel as if I’ve lost something important, even though I’ve never ever wanted to write in shorthand for myself, and never even used it to take notes at a lecture in school.
I only used shorthand when I had my secretary hat on.
I think I wouldn’t find shorthand very useful as a writer because I like to see the real words as I write them.
I read the words aloud in my head as I write them, also, because I like to hear how they sound.
I still haven’t explained how writing comes about—how we get from one thought to the next.
One thing I believe is that you can never be a writer without being a reader first.It’s the reading of all those sentences that teaches us how to make new ones of our own.The infinite varieties and rhythms seep into our neurons, are then recombined, and given our own personal inflection.
The most awful job I had in my life, next to teaching junior high math and English, was trying to teach remedial writing to college students who did not read.
You can’t make writers out of people who don’t read.
I think about people who make art without ever having seen any.They tend to make primitive art—art that hasn’t learned anything about perspective or shading or color theory—basically reinventing their own wheel without a formed culture to jump off from.
Still, these primitive, or folk artists as they are sometimes called, can be very talented and provocative.That’s because they want to be making art.
My remedial composition students did not want to be writing or reading.
I just can’t teach people how to do something they don’t want to do.
