When I describe the signature Writing is Thinking Editing approach, I make a bold claim: that for most writers, much of the time, there is a gap between what their sentence says and what it is meant to say.
This post is addressed to those who doubt that this gap is their central writing problem. It is the account of how I discovered it is my writing problem.
First, this claim is not an insult. I don’t mean to imply any scholars or writers are incompetent. It is also not a declaration of authority, as if I alone can discern what a sentence * really * means.
For me, this claim was a revelation. It completely changed everything about my writing life and writing process. I discovered that paying attention to sentences catalyzes thinking. I discovered that I don’t know exactly what I mean to say—until I see what I’ve actually said and then decide if I stand by it or if I need to revise it.
I discovered that what-I-said diverged from what-I-meant-to-say in my “Writing is Thinking” graduate seminar. First, I learned that I wrote terrible sentences. Then, I learned that almost all scholars write terrible sentences. Our class learned this lesson firsthand by looking at sentence after sentence, from our own writing and from published writing we were reading for other seminars. Our professor asked us, “What does this sentence say?” And every time we tried to answer this question, we realized that we thought we knew what it said—before she asked us and we read it closely. But now we were really thinking about it, we didn’t actually know what is was, for instance, for “factors to yield preferences” or for “a measure to build on a framework,” or just what a “comestible sensation” was.
We thought we were being clear, and it was a shock to realize we weren’t. We thought we understood an author’s sentence, but when we compared notes about what we thought it was saying, we discovered how much interpretation we were doing as readers.
As writers, we discovered the significance of asking ourselves, “What am I trying to say in this sentence?” We discovered that writing is literally thinking. That our sentences were the medium of our thoughts—that we used vague verbs as placeholders because we didn’t yet know what we were going to claim or argue—that we were scared of our readers’ objections, so we would try to cram qualifications and hedges into our sentences and paragraphs before we even stated our claim—that scholars overuse some verbs without any precision (like “interrogate,” “implement,” “intervene”), and they use adverbs (like “indirectly”) ambiguously (is she arguing indirectly or arguing that text reveals X indirectly?). We hadn’t noticed the water we swam in—the academic sentences we read by the thousands. Including the published, respected sentences written by the best in our fields, sentences which were clearly adequate for their success but which collapsed under scrutiny.
This exercise of analyzing and rewriting sentences taught us: we think our sentences say what they are meant to say because we haven’t paid sufficient attention to what they actually say.
This lesson is pulled directly from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s book Several Short Sentences about Writing, which we read in the course and which I reference in just about every Writing is Thinking blog post. He writes, “There are innumerable ways to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do…It’s hard to pay attention to what your words are actually saying. As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying” (pg 4).
Klinkenborg’s analysis didn’t convince me he was right when I read it. I discovered its truth only when I started reading to discover what sentences actually say. I quickly learned the power of this skill, and it is what I bring to every editing project I undertake.
The Writing is Thinking course inspired my before/after sentence makeover series. This series is the evidence I submit to back up my claim that there is a gap between what a sentence says and what it is supposed to say. I invite you to look around at the sentences here (and the sentences around you, wherever you are). Use them to test this claim and see if it stands up.
I don’t always get it right when, in my editing or in my sentence makeovers, I propose a version of what a sentence is supposed to say. But my efforts reveal how much work and additional thinking is required when our sentences are sloppy (and they reveal just how frequently our sentences are sloppy). My changes always go back to the writer—the only person who can confirm for us what she means to say. As an editor, I hope to help writers see what they have actually said, so that they can be sure it is what they want to say.
The “Writing is Thinking” approach acknowledges that this kind of seeing is quite difficult, even though it sounds so simple. And it produces and celebrates sentences that achieve this kind of clarity.
This exercise of analyzing and rewriting sentences taught us: we think our sentences say what they are meant to say because we haven’t paid sufficient attention to what they actually say.
writingisthinking.com