“Writing is Thinking” is a philosophical approach to academic and nonfiction writing, based on the work of Verlyn Klinkenborg and Toril Moi. They teach us to tend to our sentences. They show us how this work is fundamental to thinking clearly and communicating clearly. As Klinkenborg puts it, “Your job as a writer is making sentences.” And he identifies the crux of the issue: “There are innumerable ways to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do. What can the reader possibly believe? Your sentences or you?”
The sentence is central for two crucial reasons. First, we only know what we are saying when we put our ideas into sentences (when we in fact say or write them). Writing is thinking, and thinking without writing is often vague and amorphous. This unclarity is exposed and can be addressed when it shows up in a sentence that needs revision. Revising is thinking: working to express exactly the idea you mean and no other.
Second, readers come to our ideas through our sentences—and only through our sentences. Readers take our words to be what we mean, and they should not need to guess or puzzle about what we are trying to say. (God forbid a reviewer or hiring chair is reduced to this when faced with our texts!) As an academic author and thinker, your job is to say what you mean. The difficult intellectual task is to figure out for yourself, what do you mean? What are you saying here? Close attention to the craft of writing exposes the places where you don’t yet know the answer to that question and need to do more thinking.
“The only link between you and the reader is the sentence you’re making.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about writing
Writing is Thinking Editing
As a “Writing is Thinking” editor, I am first your reader. I pay close attention to your sentences and take them at face value. I help you see what you actually said (and what you did not). You are the writer and the thinker: this feedback gives you the opportunity to verify or clarify your ideas. By seeing what your careful reader takes away from your text, you ensure the ideas that you want to be communicating are the ones that reach others.
I also help you unpack dense academic sentences into their component ideas, so that you recognize where your prose might leave non-expert readers behind. You can then choose for yourself when to slow down and take your readers step-by-step through those ideas and when to deliberately address only an expert audience. You might be surprised to find how much you assume or try to express in a single sentence. Breaking complex ideas down into simple sentences reveals the relationships between those ideas. This can be daunting as an author, to discover where your ideas might be unfounded or tentative, but this process improves the ultimate quality of your scholarship. The confidence of really knowing what you are saying pays off when you present your work and engage with your readers, especially in contexts where your ideas are being evaluated.
It sounds so simple, to say what you mean and know what you are saying, but expertise can create blind spots for authors—blind spots that obscure things for readers. For concrete examples of the power of transforming sentences in the Writing is Thinking way, explore the blog here.
My introductory editing packages are designed for writers who are interested in exploring the value of this approach on excerpts of their texts (whether from early drafts or late ones). When you’ve seen the difference the Writing is Thinking approach can make on your own writing, we can talk about the personalized editing that would benefit you on longer manuscripts.