The Evolution of How We Think About Writing

The more you learn about the writing craft, the harder it seems

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Back in kindergarten and the early days of primary school, you learnt how to hold a pencil, how to make the graphite stain the paper and produce signs.

These signs are called letters and numbers. After some practice, you learnt how to make a sequence of them. You learnt to write your name.

And that’s how you spent the rest of your childhood: You knew how to write.

You could produce text on paper or on computers. You could create something of your own that could be read by others for many years to come. (I’m confident that what some young people write in school nowadays, may even outlive them.)

But then you grew older. You went to secondary school, to college and maybe even to university. There, you were told to write essays, reports, dissertations, theses.

You weren’t so sure if you could write anymore.

Writing this academic hocus pocus or that creative literary analysis suddenly seemed more than putting words on paper.

You became self-conscious.

You felt like you needed to learn how to write again. Just knowing how to create signs wasn’t enough anymore. You…