By Grace Daly, Senior Marketing and Professional Writing Intern
What is writing on a tangible level? Writing is the act of moving a pen on paper, creating lines and shapes that communicate meaning. It’s the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, linking letters together to engage readers. Writing often leaves fingers indented or stained with graphite or ink—or tired from the typing.
But is writing strictly a physical action? What does writing look like through a writer’s eyes?
1. Writing is an expression of emotion.
Writing allows writers to expand their ideas and express their thoughts. It frees the writer to speak their mind about what disturbs, excites, or angers them. It’s a chance to reach people beyond their immediate surroundings, offering others a glimpse into their world. Writing provides a window into the writer’s mind and experiences—vulnerable, raw, and filled with rich ideas and reflections.
2. Writing is a call to reflection.
Everyone has a frame of reference, a set of beliefs, morals, and habits they follow. Imagine a picture of a sunny day. Inside the frame, the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, and the grass is green. It is filled with everything you know to be true.
Effective writing leads the reader to look back and reflect on their own frame of reference. Perhaps instead of seeing the sun as yellow, the reader glimpses hints of orange or pink. The grass might have brown spots hidden in the green. The sky might no longer look blue but rather purple. The changes don’t need to be drastic. Maybe nothing in the frame looks different, but the reader simply pays closer attention to the shade of green in the grass or the yellow of the sun. If a reader is led to reflect on their own perspective in any way, the writer has succeeded.
3. Writing is a fluid and dynamic process.
Writing is dynamic. It is shaped more by the writer’s identity, values, and morals than by any fixed skill set. When writers learn new skills—from their earliest years of elementary school to their first years of college—they are developing new ways to view and reflect on the world. That is why calling something good writing or bad writing is limiting—even inappropriate. Writing is deeply dependent on the rhetorical situation—the audience, purpose, context, and genre—and cannot be subjected to descriptions like “good” or “bad.” Rather, it’s more about being effective or ineffective according to the rhetorical situation.
Writing is also deeply personal, evolving and being restructured over time. There are always new ways to write, new styles, genres, and forms to explore and experiment with. A writer constantly steps outside of their past comfort zones, revising, rewording, and re-evaluating their work—and reshaping themselves in the process.
4. Writing has a purpose.
Writing is purposeful. Writers intentionally connect readers to ideas beyond their own frames of reference. They want their words to be relevant to their audience, to resonate with common human emotions, desires, and flaws. In Writing to Change the World, Mary Pipher writes, “A writer’s job is to tell stories that connect readers to all the people on earth, to show these people as the complicated human beings who they really are, with histories, families, emotions, and legitimate needs.” Writing brings us closer together, bridging individual experiences and connecting us through our shared humanity. Writing breaks down human complexities, reducing us to our bare emotions. Writing is personal—it is crafted to be read, with specific readers in mind.
Writing is beautiful and heartbreaking. It can start wars or end them. Writing doesn’t speak rashly or too quickly. Each word is chosen to evoke particular emotions. The words here were written with intention, with purpose, and with the hope of prompting you, the reader, to consider what writing means to you. Maybe this essay makes you want to paint a picture of a sunny day. Or perhaps it makes you see the sky through purple glasses.
What is writing to you? What does writing look like through your eyes? Please comment and share your ideas on why you write.
Works Cited: Pipher Mary. Writing to Change the World. Riverhead Books 2006.
