Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you’ll learn to

1.​ 1.1 Reflect on and revise your beliefs about yourself as a writer.

2.​ 1.2 Understand what kinds of questions will sustain inquiry into any subject.

3.​ 1.3 Practice a method of writing and thinking that will help you generate ideas.

4.​ 1.4 Apply rhetorical knowledge to make choices in specific writing situations.

Yesterday in class, Tina wrote an essay about whether adultery is forgivable. She isn’t

married but has good friends who are, a couple she said everyone thought had the “perfect”

marriage. The woman’s husband, apparently, had an affair. Tina, who is in a pretty tight

relationship with her boyfriend, has strong feelings about cheating on a partner. It ticks her

off. “If it happened to me,” she wrote, “I would have dumped him.” Tina’s essay could easily

have become a rant about infidelity—a blunt, perhaps shrill argument about adultery’s

immorality or the depravity of two-timing men. It wasn’t. Instead, she wondered about the

relationship between friendship and love in marriage. She wondered about what kind of

communication between spouses might short-circuit cheating. She wondered how attitudes

towards sex differ between men and women. Many of these questions were explored by

Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century writer we were studying in that class, and Tina

began to wrap his thinking around hers as she struggled to make sense of how she felt

about what happened to her friends.

Tina was engaged in an act of inquiry.

Her motive was to find out what she thought rather than prove what she already knew. And

writing was the way Tina chose to think it through.

Many of us admit that we really don’t like to write, particularly when forced to do it. Or we

clearly prefer certain kinds of writing and dislike others: “I just like to write funny stories,” or “I
like writing for myself and not for other people,” or “I hate writing research papers.” I can

understand this, because for years I felt much the same way. I saw virtually no similarities

between a note to a friend and the paper I wrote for my philosophy class in college. Words

had power in one context but seemed flimsy and vacant in another. One kind of writing was

fairly easy; the other was like sweating blood. How could my experiences as a writer be so

fundamentally different? In other words, what’s the secret of writing well in a range of writing

contexts and enjoying it more in all contexts? Here’s what I had to learn:

1. You don’t have to know what you think before you’re ready to write. Writing can

be a way of discovering what you think.

2. A key to writing well is understanding the process of doing it.

They’re not particularly novel ideas, but both were a revelation to me when I finally figured

them out late in my career as a student, and they changed for good the way I wrote. These

two insights—that writing is a means of discovery and that reflecting on how we write can

help us write—are guiding principles of this book. I won’t guarantee that after they read The

Curious Writer, haters of writing will come to love it or that lovers of writing won’t find writing

to be hard work. But I hope that by the end of the book, you’ll experience the pleasure of

discovery in different writing situations, and that you’ll understand your writing process well

enough to adapt it to the demands of whatever situation you encounter.

Motives for Writing

Why write? To start, I’d propose two motives, one obvious and the other less so:

1. ​ To share ideas or information—to communicate.

2. ​ To think—to discover.
These two motives for writing—to communicate with others and to discover what the writer

thinks and feels—are equally important. And both may ultimately relate to what I call our

spirit of inquiry, which is born of our deeper sense of wonder and curiosity or even confusion

and doubt, our desire to touch other people, our urge to solve problems. The spirit of inquiry

is a kind of perspective toward the world that invites questions, accepts uncertainty, and

makes each of us feel some responsibility for what we say. This inquiring spirit should be

familiar to you. It’s the feeling you had when you discovered that the sun and a simple

magnifying glass could be used to burn a hole in an oak leaf. It’s wondering what a teacher

meant when he said that World War II was a “good” war and Vietnam was a “bad” war. It’s

the questions that haunted you yesterday as you listened to a good friend describe her

struggles with anorexia. The inquiring spirit even drives your quest to find a smartphone, an

effort that inspires you to read about the technology and visit the Consumer Reports website at

consumerreports.org. Inquiry was Tina’s motive when she decided to turn her academic

essay on adultery away from a shrill argument based on what she already believed into a

more thoughtful exploration of why people cheat.

Beliefs About Writing and Writing

Development
1. 1.1Reflect on and revise your beliefs about yourself as a writer.

Most of us have been taught about writing since the first grade. We usually enter college

with beliefs not only about what makes a good paper and what “rules” of writing to follow, but
also about how we can develop as writers. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve learned a lot about

writing since my first years in ­college, and a big part of that learning involved unraveling

some of my prior beliefs about writing. In fact, I’d say that my development as a writer initially

had more to do with unlearning some of what I already knew than it did with discovering new

ways to write. But you have to make your beliefs explicit if you’re going to make decisions

about which are helpful and which aren’t. So take a moment to find out what your beliefs are

and to think about whether they actually make sense.

Exercise 1.1

This I Believe (and This I Don’t)

1. ​ Step One: From the following list, identify the one belief about writing that you

agree with most strongly and the one that you’re convinced isn’t true.

1. ​ Writing proficiency begins with learning the basics and then building on

them, working from words to sentences to paragraphs to compositions.

2. ​ The best way to develop as a writer is to imitate the writing of the people

you want to write like.

3. ​ People are born writers like people are born good at math. Either you can

do it or you can’t.

4. ​ The best way to develop as a writer is to develop good reading skills.

5. ​ Practice is the key to a writer’s development. The more a writer writes, the

more he or she will improve.

6. ​ Developing writers need to learn the modes of writing (argument,

exposition, description, narration) and the genres (essays, research

papers, position papers, and so on).

 7. ​ Developing writers should start with simple writing tasks, such as telling

stories, and move to harder writing tasks, such as writing a research

paper.

8. ​ The most important thing that influences a writer’s growth is believing that

he or she can improve.

9. ​ The key to becoming a better writer is finding your voice.

1. ​ Step Two: Look over the following journal prompts (for more on journals, see the

“Inquiring into the Details: Journals” box). Then spend five minutes writing in your

journal about why you agree with the one belief and disagree with the other. This

is an open-ended “fastwrite.” You should write fast and without stopping, ­letting

your thoughts flow in whatever direction they go. In your fastwrite, you can

respond to any or all of the prompts to whatever extent you want.

Rules for Fastwriting

1. ​ There are no rules.

2. ​ Don’t try to write badly, but give yourself permission to do so.

3. ​ To the extent you can, think through writing rather than before it.

4. ​ Keep your pen moving.

5. ​ If you run out of things to say, write about how weird it is to run out of things to

say until new thoughts arrive.

6. ​ Silence your internal critic to suspend judgment.

7. ​ Don’t censor yourself.

Journal Prompts

· What do you mean, exactly, when you say you agree or disagree with the belief? Can

you explain more fully why you think the belief is true or false?
 · When did you start agreeing or disagreeing with the belief? Can you remember a

particular moment or experience as a student learning to write that this agreement or

disagreement connects to?

· Who was most influential in convincing you of the truth or falsity of the belief?

One Student’s Response

Bernice’s Journal

Exercise 1.1

Step Two
I used to be a firm believer in the idea of born writers—it was a genetic thing. People were

gifted with the gold pen genes, or they weren’t. Writing as a process involved a muse,

inspiration, and luck. Things uncontrollable by the writer. Then I started writing, mostly for my

101 class, and I started to feel powerful when I put words on paper. In control. The idea of

my voice, my words, just being on the page and other people reading it and maybe liking it

was a rush. I was always the girl who specialized in the art of being unnoticed, unseen,

blending in. My Comp 101 prof. liked my writing and pushed me really hard to work on my

basics, to think about my process, to prewrite and revise. I started to see a clear distinction

between how to write and what to write. How is all mixed up with the process, with discipline,

with practice and perseverance. . . . The how isn’t something you are born with; it’s

something you develop, something you practice, a skill you hone. . . . Becoming a good

writer takes learning how to write, figuring out a process that works for you, and then letting

your voice be heard on the page.

Inquiring into the Details

Journals

Here are five things that make a journal especially useful for writers:

· Feel comfortable writing badly. Whether print or digital, the journal must be a place

where you’re able to largely ignore your internal critic.

· Use it throughout the writing process. Journals can be indispensable for invention

whenever you need more information, not just at the beginning. They can also be a

place where you talk to yourself about how to solve a writing problem.

· Write both specifically and abstractly. Sometimes you’ll be trying to be as concrete

as possible, generating details, collecting facts, exploring particular experiences.

Other times, use the journal to think in more-abstract language, thinking through

ideas, reflecting on process, analyzing claims.

· Don’t make any rules about your journal. These rules usually begin with a thought

like “I’ll only write in my journal when. . . .” Write in your journal whenever you find it

useful, and in any way that you find useful, especially if it keeps you writing.

· Experiment. Your journal will be different from my journal, which will be different from

the journal of the woman sitting next to you in class. The only way to make a journal

genuinely useful is to keep trying ways to make it useful.

Unlearning Unhelpful Beliefs

You won’t be surprised when I say that I have a lot of theories about writing development;

after all, I’m supposedly the expert. But we are all writing theorists, with beliefs that grow out

of our successes and failures as people who write. Because you don’t think much about

them, these beliefs often shape your response to writing instruction without your even

knowing it. For example, I’ve had a number of students who believe that people are born

writers. This belief, of course, would make any kind of writing class a waste of time, because

writing ability would be a matter of genetics.

A much more common belief is that learning to write is a process of building on basics,

beginning with words and then working up to sentences, paragraphs, and perhaps whole

compositions. This belief was very common when I was taught writing. I remember slogging

my way through Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition in the seventh and eighth

grades, dutifully working through chapter after chapter.

Today, along with a lot of experts on writing instruction, I don’t think that this foundational

approach to writing development is very effective. While I can still diagram a sentence, for

example, that’s never a skill I call on when I’m composing.

And yet building on the basics seems like common sense, doesn’t it? This brings up an

important point: Unlearning involves rejecting common sense if it conflicts with what actually

works. Throughout this book, I hope you’ll constantly test your beliefs about writing against

the experiences you’re having with it. Pay attention to what seems to work for you and what

doesn’t. Mostly, I’d like you at least initially to play what one writing instructor calls the

­believing game. Ask yourself, What will I gain as a writer if I try believing this is true? For

example, even if you’ve believed for much of your life that you should never write anything in

school that doesn’t follow an outline, you might discover that abandoning this “rule”

sometimes helps you to use writing to discover what you think.

Unlearning involves rejecting common sense if it conflicts with what actually works.

The Beliefs of This Book

Allatonceness.

One of the metaphors I very much like about writing development is offered by writing

theorist Ann E. Berthoff. She said learning to write is like learning to ride a bike. You don’t

start by practicing handlebar skills, move on to pedaling practice, and then finally learn

balancing techniques. You get on the bike and fall off, get up, and try again, doing all of
those separate things at once. At some point, you don’t fall and you pedal off down the

street. Berthoff said writing is a process that involves allatonceness (all-at-once-ness), and

it’s simply not helpful to try to practice the subskills separately. This book shares the belief in

the allatonceness of writing development.

Believing You Can Learn to Write Well.

Various other beliefs about writing development—the importance of critical thinking, the

connection between reading and writing, the power of voice and fluency, and the need to

listen to voices other than your own—also help to guide this book. One belief, though,

undergirds them all: The most important thing that influences a writer’s growth is believing that he

or she can learn to write well. Faith in your ability to ­become a better writer is key. From it

grows the motivation to learn how to write well.

Faith isn’t easy to come by. I didn’t have it as a writer through most of my school career,

because I assumed that being placed in the English class for underachievers meant that

writing was simply another thing, like track and math, that I was mediocre at. For a long time,

I was a captive to this attitude. But then, in college I wrote a paper I cared about; writing

started to matter, because I discovered something I really wanted to say and say well. This

was the beginning of my belief in myself—and of my becoming a better writer. Belief requires

motivation, and one powerful motivator is to approach a writing assignment as an

opportunity to learn something—that is, to approach it with what I have called the spirit of

inquiry.

Habits of Mind
When I first started teaching writing, I noticed a strange thing in my classes. What students

learned about writing through the early assignments in the class didn’t seem to transfer to
later assignments, particularly research papers. What was I doing wrong? I wondered.

Among other things, what I’d failed to make clear to my students was that certain “habits of

mind” (or dispositions, as one writer terms them) could be consistently useful to them, in

writing papers in my course and in any course involving academic inquiry—habits related to

seeing writing as a process of discovery. We’ll look at several closely related habits here;

later in this chapter, you’ll see how they play a role in the writing process.

Starting with Questions, Not Answers

1. 1.2Understand what kinds of questions will sustain inquiry into any subject.

A lot of people think that writing is about recording what you already know, which accounts

for those who choose familiar topics to write on when given the choice. “I think I’ll write about

,” the thinking goes, “because I know that topic really well and already have an idea what I

can say.” Writers who write about what they know usually start with answers rather than

questions. In some writing situations this makes a lot of sense, because you’re being asked

specifically to prove that you know something. I’m thinking of an essay exam, for instance.

But more often, writing in a university is about inquiry, not reporting information. It’s about

discovery. It’s about finding the questions that ultimately lead to interesting answers.

Making the Familiar Strange.

Starting with questions rather than answers changes everything. It means finding new ways to

see what you’ve seen before. Take this for ­example:

What is it? An iPhone, of course. Not much more to say, right? But imagine that your

purpose isn’t to simply provide the quickest answer possible to the simple factual question

What is it? Consider instead starting with questions that might inspire you to think about the

iPhone in ways you haven’t before; for example,

 · What does it mean that iPhone owners spend twice as much time playing games as

other smartphone users?

· What should be done about the environmental impacts of iPhone production in

China?

Both these questions lead you to potentially new information and new ways of seeing that

familiar phone in your pocket. They promise that you’ll discover something you didn’t know

before.

Questions open up the inquiry process, while quick answers close it down. When you

discover what you think, you don’t cook up a thesis before you start—you discover the thesis

as you explore. But to work, the inquiry process demands something of us that most of us

aren’t used to: suspending judgment.

Suspending Judgment

We jerk our knee when physicians tap the patellar tendon. If everything is working, we do it

reflexively. We’re often just as reflexive in our responses to the world:

· “What do you think of American politicians?”

“They’re all corrupt.”

· “Is it possible to reconcile economic growth with the preservation of ­natural

resources?”

“No.”

· “Isn’t this an interesting stone?”

“It’s just a rock.”

We make these judgments out of habit. But this habit is in fact a way of seeing, based on

this premise: Some things are really pretty simple, more or less black-and-white, good or
bad, boring or interesting. Academic inquiry works from another, very different premise: The

world is really a wonderfully complex place, and if we look closely and long enough, and ask the

right questions, we are likely to be surprised at what we see. A condition of inquiry is that

you don’t rush to judgment; you tolerate uncertainty while you explore your subject.

Academic inquiry requires that you see your preconceptions as hypotheses that can be

tested, not established truths. It is, in short, associated with a habit of suspending judgment.

It’s okay to write badly. Resist the tendency to judge too soon and too harshly.

Being Willing to Write Badly

In a writing course such as this one, the challenge of suspending judgment begins with how

you approach your own writing. What’s one of the most common problems I see in student

writers? Poor grammar? Lack of organization? A missing thesis? Nope. It’s the tendency to

judge too soon and too harshly. A great majority of my students—including really smart,

capable writers—have powerful internal critics, or, as the novelist Gail Godwin once called

them, “Watchers at the Gates.” This is the voice you may hear when you’re starting to write a

paper, the one that has you crossing out that first sentence or that first paragraph over and

over until you “get it perfect.”

The only way to overcome this problem is to suspend judgment. In doing so, you essentially

tell your Watcher this: It’s okay to write badly. Godwin once suggested that writers confront

their internal critics by writing them a letter.

Dear Watcher,

Ever since the eighth grade, when I had Mrs. O’Neal for English, I’ve been seeing red. This

is the color of every correction and every comment (“awk”) you’ve made in the margins on

my school writing. Now, years later, I just imagine you, ready to pick away at my prose every

time I sit down to write. This time will be different. . . .

It might help to write your internal critic a letter like this. Rein in that self-critical part of

yourself, and you’ll find that writing can be a tool for invention—a way to generate

material—and that you can think through writing rather than waiting around for the thoughts to

come. You need your internal critic. But you need it to work with you, not against you. Later

in this chapter, I’ll show you how to accomplish this.

Searching for Surprise

1. 1.3Practice a method of writing and thinking that will help you generate ideas.

Starting with questions, making the familiar strange, suspending judgment, and writing

badly—all are related to searching for surprise. In fact, one of the key benefits of writing

badly is surprise. This was a revelation for me. I was convinced that you never pick up the

pen unless you know what you want to say. Once I realized I could write badly and use

writing not to record what I already knew, but to discover what I thought, this way of writing

promised a feast of surprises that made me hunger to put words on the page. If you’re

skeptical that your own writing can surprise you, try the following exercise.

Conditions That Make “Bad” Writing Possible

1. Willingness to suspend judgment

2. Ability to write fast enough to outrun your internal critic

3. Belief that confusion, uncertainty, and ambiguity help thought rather than hinder it

4. Interest in writing about “risky” subjects, or those about which you don’t know

what you want to say until you say it

Exercise 1.2

A Roomful of Details
 1. ​ Step One: Spend ten minutes brainstorming a list of details based on the

following prompt. Write down whatever comes into your mind, no matter how silly.

Be specific and don’t censor yourself.

Try to remember a room you spent a lot of time in as a child. It may be your bedroom in the back

of your house or apartment, or the kitchen where your grandmother made thick, red pasta sauce or

latkes. Put yourself back in that room. Now look around you. What do you see? What do you

hear? What do you smell?

Brainstorming

§ Anything goes.

§ Don’t censor yourself.

§ Write everything down.

§ Be playful but stay focused.

1. ​ Step Two: Examine your list. If things went well, you will have a fairly long list of

details. As you review the list, identify the one detail that surprises you the most,

a detail that seems somehow to carry an unexpected charge. This might be

­something that seems connected to a feeling or a story. You might be drawn to a

detail that confuses you a little. Whatever its particular appeal, circle it.

2. ​ Step Three: Use the circled detail as a prompt for a seven-minute fastwrite.

Begin by focusing on the detail: What does it make you think of? And then what?

And then? Alternatively, begin by simply describing the detail more fully: What

does it look like? Where did it come from? What stories are attached to it? How

does it make you feel? Avoid writing in generalities. Write about specifics—that is,

particular times, places, moments, and people. Write fast, and chase after the

words to see where they want to go. Give yourself permission to write badly.

You may experience at least three kinds of surprise after completing a fastwriting exercise

such as the one above:

 1. ​ Surprise about how much writing you did in such a short time

2. ​ Surprise about discovering a topic you didn’t expect to find

3. ​ Surprise about discovering a new way of understanding or seeing a ­familiar topic

One Student’s Response

Bernice’s Journal

Exercise 1.2

Step Three

Detail: Stainless Steel Counters

When I was five or six my father and I made cookies for the first time. I don’t ­remember what

prompted him to bake cookies, he liked to cook but he didn’t read very well so he didn’t like

to use cook books. I remember sitting on the cold stainless steel, the big red and white cook

book splayed over my lap. I was reading it out loud to my dad. The kitchen was warm but

everything gleamed; it was industrial and functional. It was the only room in our house that

still looked like it belonged to the “Old Pioneer School.” My dad and uncles had renovated

every other room into bedrooms, playrooms, family rooms. The place was huge but cozy, it

was home. I remember reading off ingredients until I got to the sugar. It called for 3/4 cup

and I didn’t understand the fraction. I thought it meant three or four cups. We poured so

much sugar into the bowl. The cookies were terrible. Hard and glassy, too sweet and brittle.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood that my dad didn’t understand the measurement

either. He was persistent though. We pulled down every cook book in the house until we

found one that described the measuring cups and what they meant. We started all over and

our second batch was perfect. My dad is one of the smartest people I know, inventive,

imaginative but he only has a rudimentary education. He can read and write enough to get

by, he’s gifted with numbers, but I can’t help looking back and wondering what he could have
been, what he could have done for the world if just one person had taken him by the hand

and showed him what he showed me. If just one person had told him not to give up, to keep

trying, that in the end it will be worth all the work, I wonder who he could have been if one

person had seen his curiosity and imagination and fostered it instead of seeing his muscles

and capable hands and putting him to work. If just one person had told him that his mind was

the greatest tool he possessed. If just one person baked cookies with him.

The kind of surprises you encounter doing this sort of writing may not always be profound.

They may not even provide you with obvious essay topics. With any luck, though, by hunting

for surprises in your own work, you will begin to experience the pleasure of writing to learn.

That’s no small thing, particularly if you’ve always believed that writers should have it all

figured out before they pick up the pen.

Writing Situations and Rhetorical

Choices
The following isn’t good writing, is it?

1. 1.4Apply rhetorical knowledge to make choices in specific writing situations.

im happy to be back w/u guys it was a too long of a weekend- dancing friday then? u hailey and i

runnin tomorrow- sounds fun 2 me

Actually, the answer is, of course, that it depends.

Writing occurs in a writing situation, and different writing situations are associated with

different types of writing and forms of communication—different genres and media. Think of
how many writing situations we encounter these days and how many types of writing we do.

For example, besides writing part of this textbook chapter, I wrote e-mails to an editor and a

student, freewrote in my journal, drafted some text for a web page, sent a text to my

daughter, and posted a comment on Facebook.

In each case, the writing situation demanded something different from me. In each, however,

I had to make appropriate rhetorical choices—choices related to the following four

considerations:

· Purpose for writing: What is the text trying to do?

· Audience: For whom is it intended?

· Subject: What is it about?

· Genre/Medium: What type of writing—what form of communication—would work

best in view of my purpose, audience, and subject? What are its strengths and

limitations, and what are its conventions?

That is, to write effectively, I had to think about why I was writing, to whom I was writing,

what I was writing about, and what type of text I was writing. The effectiveness of my writing

depended on my making appropriate choices in light of these considerations. And the

rhetorical choices that we make in a writing situation are wide ranging; they include not only

big choices (What’s the best genre for accomplishing my purpose with this audience?), but

also many smaller choices (Is it okay to say “ur” instead of “you’re”?).

Now let’s go back to the text message, written by my daughter to a friend.

Rhetorical The Text Message

Consideration
 Purpose Expressive and informational purposes: to ­reinforce intimacy; to

plan

Audience A close friend, with considerable shared ­knowledge

Subject Personal details related to knowledge of a shared experience

Genre/Medium Text message; limited to 160 characters, with a shorthand shared

by users

Based on this analysis, my daughter’s text message is clearly good writing after all. It uses

the conventions of the genre/medium to fulfill its purpose—­reinforce intimacy and make a

Friday-night plan—for the audience the writer had in mind. My daughter used her rhetorical

knowledge to make choices that resulted in an effective piece of writing. Of course, she would

think it is weird to call her understanding of how to write a text message “rhetorical

knowledge.” But that’s exactly what it is. She just doesn’t think about it that way.

But what happens when you do think about it?

1.​ You become more skillful at composing in writing situations with which you are

familiar.

2.​ You can learn to master unfamiliar writing situations much more quickly.

3. ​ You have more rhetorical knowledge than you think. After all, you’ve been writing

and speaking all your life. But when you start becoming aware of this knowledge,
 it becomes more powerful, and you become a better writer. Throughout The

Curious Writer, I’ll encourage you to think rhetorically.

4. ​ In the next years of college, you’ll be encountering unfamiliar writing situations, so

learning to reflect on how each involves rhetorical choices will make you a much

better communicator. (By the way, we also use this rhetorical knowledge to

analyze how well someone else communicates, which is the focus of Chapter 2.)

Learning to write well, then, isn’t simply learning how to craft transitions, organize

information, and follow grammatical “rules”—it’s also learning to recognize that

each writing situation asks you for something different. For example, in college

writing situations, the basic rhetorical considerations, as in Figure 1.1, “Thinking

rhetorically,” may be expanded with questions such as these:

Figure 1.1 Thinking rhetorically.

Rhetorical choices involve four considerations: purpose, subject, audience, and

genre/medium. Each consideration is associated with questions. For genre/medium, these

include conditions and conventions regarding what you can say and ­especially how you say

it. While all considerations have always been important in rhetorical thinking, genre and

medium are especially critical to consider now that you may have alternatives to writing

traditional term papers, including PowerPoints, podcasts, video, visuals, and a host of other

multimodal approaches.

· What is the purpose of the assignment? To interpret or analyze? Synthesize or

summarize? Argue or explore?

· What is the subject, and what does that imply about my approach? Are there certain

ways of writing about topics in history, psychology, or literature that differ from writing

about topics in biology, social science, or business?

· Am I writing for an expert audience or a general audience? For my instructor or my

peers?
 · What is the form or genre for this assignment, and what are its conventions? What

kind of evidence should I use? How is it organized?

You won’t always have control over all of these choices. In college, you’ll get writing

assignments that may supply you with a purpose: “Write an essay that compares the energy

efficiency of solar panels with that of a conventional coal power plant.” Sometimes the form

isn’t up to you: “Write a five-page argument paper.” But even when you have such

constraints, you still have a lot of rhetorical choices to make—things like: “Should I use the

first person? What evidence do I need, and where should it come from?”

Each genre and medium imposes its own conditions on the writer. For example, my

daughter’s text message can’t be more than 160 characters, and that limitation inspired,

among other things, a shorthand for composing that uses characters sparingly. Considering

genre and medium is especially important now that the forms of communication have

expanded radically, even in academia. You may write not just a term paper. You might do a

PowerPoint, make a poster, build a web page, collaborate on a wiki, or produce a podcast.

Thinking about rhetorical contexts increases the chance that you’ll make good choices when

you solve problems as a writer, particularly in revision. Much like riding Berthoff’s bike, in

composing, writers usually think about purpose, audience, subject, and genre/medium all at

once, drawing on their experience with similar writing situations.

A First Reflection on Your Writing

Process
There is a process for doing almost anything—fixing a broken washing machine, learning

how to play tennis, studying for the SAT, and, of course, writing. Why, then, do some English

teachers seem to make such a big deal out of reflecting on your writing process? Here’s

why:

· First, the process of writing, like any process that we do frequently, is not something

that we think about.

· As a consequence, when we write, we tend to focus just on what and not on how, just

on the product and not on the process. And then, when problems arise, we don’t see

many options for solving them—we get stuck and we get frustrated.

· If, however, we start to pay attention to how we write in a variety of situations, two

things happen: We become aware of our old habits that don’t always help and may

actually hinder our success with writing. Second—and this is most important—we

begin to understand that there are actually choices we can make when problems

arise, and we become aware of what some of those choices are.

· In short, the more we understand the writing process, the more control we get over it.

Getting control of the process means the product gets better.1

1
There is considerable research in learning theory that confirms these conclusions; in

particular, so-called metacognitive thinking—the awareness of how you do

things—increases the transfer of relevant knowledge from one situation to another. In

other words, what you learn about how to do something in one situation gets more easily

activated in another situation.

A Case Study

Here’s an example of what I mean. Chauntain summarized her process this way: “Do one

and be done.” She always wrote her essays at the last minute and only wrote a single draft.

She approached nearly every writing assignment the same way: Start with a thesis, and then
develop five topic sentences that support the thesis, with three supporting details under

each. This structure was a container into which she poured all her prose. Chauntain

deliberated over every sentence, trying to make each one perfect, and as a result, she spent

considerable time staring off into space searching for the right word or phrase. It was agony.

The papers were almost always dull—she thought so too—and just as often she struggled to

reach the required page length. Chauntain had no idea of any other way to write a school

essay. As a matter of fact, she thought it was really the only way. So when she got an

assignment in her economics class to write an essay in which she was to use economic

principles to analyze a question that arose from a personal observation, Chauntain was

bewildered. How should she start? Could she rely on her old standby structure—thesis, topic

sentences, supporting details? She felt stuck.

Because she failed to see that she had choices related to both process and this particular

writing situation, she also had no clue what those choices were. That’s why we study

process. It helps us solve problems such as these. And it must begin with a self-study of

your own habits as a writer, identifying not just how you tend to do things, but the patterns of

problems that might arise when you do them.

Thinking About Your Process

You will reflect on your writing and reading processes again and again throughout this book,

so that by the end you may be able to tell the story of your processes and how you are

changing them to produce better writing more efficiently. The reflective letter in your portfolio

(see Appendix A) might be where you finally share that story in full. Now is a good time to

begin telling yourself that story.

What do you remember about your own journey as a writer both inside and outside of

school? One of my earliest, most pleasant memories of writing is listening to the sound of

the clacking of my father’s old Royal typewriter in the room down the hall as I was going to
sleep. I imagine him there now, in the small study that we called the “blue room,” enveloped

in a cloud of pipe smoke. It is likely that he was writing advertising copy back then, or

perhaps a script for a commercial in which my mother, an actress, would appear. I loved the

idea of writing then. The steady hammering of typewriter keys sounded effortless yet at the

same time solid, significant. This all changed, I think, in the eighth grade when it seemed

that writing was much more about following rules than tapping along to a lively dance of

words.

Spend some time telling your own story about how your relationship to writing evolved.

When you get a writing assignment, your habit may be to compose carefully. This

assignment, in contrast, is all about invention—about generating ideas.

Exercise 1.3

Literacy Narrative Collage

In your journal, create a collage of moments, memories, and reflections related to your

experience with writing. For each prompt, write fast for about four minutes. Keep your pen or

fingers on the keyboard moving, and give yourself permission to write badly. After you’ve

responded to one prompt, skip a line and move on to the next one. Set aside about twenty

minutes for this generating activity.

1. ​ What is your earliest memory of writing? Tell the story.

2. ​ We usually divide our experiences as writers into private writing and school

writing, or writing we do by choice and writing we are required to do for a grade.

Let’s focus on school writing. Tell the story of a teacher, a class, an essay, an

exam, or a moment that you consider a turning point in your understanding of

yourself as a writer or your understanding of school writing.

 3. ​ Writing is part of the fabric of everyday life in the United States, and this is truer

than ever with Internet communication. Describe the roles that writing plays in a

typical day for you. How have these daily roles of writing changed in your lifetime

so far?

4. ​ What is the most successful (or least successful) thing you’ve ever written in or

out of school? Tell the story.

Congratulations. You’ve made a mess. But I hope this collage of your experiences as a

writer is an interesting mess, one that brought some little surprises. As you look at these four

fragments of fastwriting, you might begin to sense a pattern. Is there a certain idea about

yourself as a writer that seems to emerge in these various contexts? It’s more likely that one,

or perhaps two, of the prompts really took off for you, presenting trails you’d like to continue

following. Or maybe nothing happened. For now, set your journal aside. You may return to

this ­material if your instructor invites you to draft a longer narrative about your writing

experiences, or you might find a place for some of this writing in your portfolio.

Now that you’ve spent some time telling a story of your background as a writer, use the

following survey to pin down some of your habits and experiences related to school writing.

The questions in the survey can help you develop a profile of your writing process and help

you identify problems you might want to address by altering your process.

Exercise 1.4

What Is Your Process?

Step One: Complete the Self-Evaluation Survey.

Self-Evaluation Survey
1. ​ When you’re given a school writing assignment, do you wait until the last minute

to finish it?

Always———Often———Sometimes———Rarely———Never

2. ​ How often have you had the experience of learning something you didn’t expect

through writing about it?

Very often———Fairly often———Sometimes———Rarely———Never

3. ​ Do you generally plan out what you’re going to write before you write it?

Always———Often———Sometimes———Rarely———Never

4. ​ Prewriting describes activities that some writers engage in before they begin a

first draft. Prewriting might include such invention activities as freewriting or

fastwriting, making lists, brainstorming or mapping, collecting information,

browsing the web, talking to someone about the essay topic, reading up on it, or

jotting down ideas in a notebook or journal. How much prewriting do you tend to

do for the following types of assignments? Circle the appropriate answer.

§ A personal narrative:

§ A great deal———Some———Very little———None———Haven’t written one

§ A critical essay about a short story, novel, or poem:

§ A great deal———Some———Very little———None———Haven’t written one

§ A research paper:

§ A great deal———Some———Very little———None———Haven’t written one

§ An essay exam:

§ A great deal———Some———Very little———None———Haven’t written one

5. ​ At what point(s) in writing an academic paper do you often find yourself getting

stuck? Check all that apply.

§ Getting started

§ In the middle

§ Finishing

§ I never/rarely get stuck (go on to question 9)

 § Other:

6. ​ If you usually have problems getting started on a paper, which of the following do

you often find hardest to do? Check all that apply. (If you don’t have trouble

getting started, go on to question 7.)

§ Deciding on a topic

§ Writing an introduction

§ Finding the time to begin

§ Figuring out exactly what I’m supposed to do for the assignment

§ Finding a purpose or focus for the paper

§ Finding the right tone

§ Other:

7. ​ If you usually get stuck in the middle of a paper, which of the following cause(s)

the most problems? Check all that apply. (If writing the middle of a paper isn’t a

problem for you, go on to question 8.)

§ Keeping focused on the topic

§ Finding enough information to meet page-length requirements

§ Following my plan for how I want to write the paper

§ Bringing in other research or points of view

§ Organizing all my information

§ Trying to avoid plagiarism

§ Worrying about whether the paper meets the requirements of the ­assignment

§ Worrying that the paper just isn’t any good

§ Messing with citations

§ Other:

8. ​ If you have difficulty finishing a paper, which of the following difficulties is/are

typical for you? Check all that apply. (If finishing isn’t a problem for you, go on to

question 9.)

§ Composing a last paragraph or conclusion

 § Worrying that the paper doesn’t meet the requirements of the assignment

§ Worrying that the paper just isn’t any good

§ Trying to keep focused on the main idea or thesis

§ Trying to avoid repeating myself

§ Realizing I don’t have enough information

§ Dealing with the bibliography or citations

§ Other:

9. ​ Rank the following list of approaches to revision so that it reflects the strategies

you use most often to least often when rewriting academic papers. Rank the items

1–6, with the strategy you use most often as a 1 and the strategy you use least

often as a 6.

§ 1 I just tidy things up—editing sentences, checking spelling, looking for

grammatical errors, fixing formatting, and performing other proofreading activities.

§ 2 I look for ways to reorganize existing information in the draft to make it

more effective.

1.​

o 4 I try to fill holes by adding more information.

o 6 I do more research.

o 5 I change the focus or even the main idea, rewriting sections, adding or

removing information, and changing the order of things.

o 3 I rarely do any revision.

2.​ Finally, do you tend to impose a lot of conditions on when, where, or how you think

you write most effectively? (For example, do you need a certain pen, do you always

have to write on a computer, do you need to be in certain kinds of places, must it be

 quiet or noisy, do you write best under pressure?) Or can you write under a range of

circumstances, with few or no conditions? Circle one.

Lots of conditions———Some———A few———No conditions

If you impose conditions on when, where, or how you write, list some of those

conditions here:

1.​ quiet

2.​ Equipment (blue pens)

3.​ Slight quiet music

Step Two: In small groups, discuss the results of the survey. Begin by picking someone to

tally the answers to each question. Post these on the board, a large sheet of paper, or a

spreadsheet, so they can then be added up for the class. Analyze the results for your group.

In particular, discuss the following questions:

· Are there patterns in the responses? Yes Do most group members seem to ­answer

certain questions in similar or different ways? No Are there interesting

contradictions? Blue pen vs black pen

· Based on these results, what “typical” habits or challenges do writers in your class

seem to share?

· What struck you most?

Problem Solving in Your Writing Process

If you took the survey, you probably uncovered some problems with your writing process.

The great news for those of us who struggle with certain aspects of writing—and who
doesn’t?—is that you can do something about it. As you identify the obstacles to doing better

work, you can change the way you approach writing tasks. For instance, consider some of

the more common problems students struggle with and some ideas about how The Curious

Writer can help you with them.

Writing Possible Cause A Solution

Problem

Consistently Writer works from scarcity. Focus on invention. Generate more

writes short. Begins the draft with too material before you ­begin the draft,

Often can’t little information on the through research, ­fastwriting, etc. (see

meet page topic. “Inquiring into the Details: Invention

requirements Strategies” in this ­chapter).

for

­assignments.

Dislikes Writer spends a great deal Write a fast draft and then do deeper

revision, ­espe- of time writing the first draft revision. Attack the draft physically (see

cially if it and trying to make it Revision Strategy 14.18 in ­Chapter 14).

involves more “perfect.” Gets

than “tidying” overcommitted to the initial

things up. approach to the topic.

Writer’s block. Internal critic is too harsh Find a place where you can write badly

too early in the writing without it feeling like a performance. A

journal or notebook ­often works (see

 process. Often involves “Inquiring into the Details: Journals” in

anxiety about audience. this chapter).

Dislikes Writer may be unused to Use your own curiosity and questions to

open-ended valuing own thinking. Little drive the process. Craft questions that are

­assignments. experience with useful guides for exploration and promise

Would rather ­assignments in which discovery and learning (see “Starting with

be told what to writer must discover own Questions, Not Answers” in this chapter).

write about. purpose.

Struggles with Writer doesn’t exploit key Effectively combine invention with

focus. Able to opportunities to look at evaluation, generating with judging, by

write a lot but writing critically, to evaluate using a process that makes room for both

can’t seem to and judge what she has as you write (see “The Nature of the

stay on topic. generated. Writing Process” below).

The Nature of the Writing Process

Earlier you saw Chauntain’s writing process. Here was my writing process when I was in

school:

1. ​ Get the assignment. Find out when it is due and how long it is supposed to be.
 2. ​ Wait until the night before it is due and get started.

3. ​ Stare off into space.

4. ​ Eat ice cream.

5. ​ Write a sketchy outline.

6. ​ Write a sentence; then cross it out.

7. ​ Stare off into space.

8. ​ Write another sentence, and then squeeze out a few more.

9. ​ Think about Lori Jo Flink, and then stare off into space.

10. Write a paragraph. Feel relief and disgust.

I would get the work done eventually, but the process was agonizing and the product

mediocre. What did I conclude from this back then? That I wasn’t good at writing, which was

no big surprise because I pretty much hated it. Something happened to me to change that

view, of course, because you hold my book in your hands. I came to understand the

problems in my writing process: I viewed writing as a straight march forward from beginning

to end, one where I had to wait for something to come into my head and then try to get it

down. At all costs, I avoided things like new ideas or other ways of seeing a topic—anything

that might get in the way of the drive to the conclusion. If I thought about anything, it was

trying to find the “perfect” way of saying things or worrying about whether I was faithfully

following a certain structure. I rarely learned anything from my writing. I certainly never

expected I should.

Suspending judgment feels freer, exploratory. . . . Making judgments shifts the writer into an

analytical mode.
The Writing Process as Recursive and Flexible

But this straight march isn’t the way experienced writers work at all. The writing process isn’t

a linear trajectory, but a looping, recursive process—one that encourages thinking, not simply

recording the thoughts that you already have. Writing doesn’t involve a series of steps that

you must follow in every situation; on the contrary:

· The writing process is recursive, a much messier zigzag between collecting

information and focusing on it, exploring things and thinking about them, writing and

rewriting, reviewing and rearranging, and so on. For example, invention strategies

are useful at many points in the writing process.

· The process is flexible and always influenced by the writing situation. For ­instance,

experienced writers have a keen sense of audience, and they use this to cue their

choices about a change in tone or whether an example might help clarify a point.

These are exactly the kinds of adjustments you make in social situations all the time.

A System for Using Writing to Think

What do I mean when I say the writing process encourages thinking? Usually, when we

imagine someone who is “deep in thought,” we see him staring off into space with a furrowed

brow, chin nested in one hand. He is not writing. He may be thinking about what he’s going to

write, but in the meantime the cursor is parked on the computer screen or the pen rests on

the desk. Thinking like this is good—I do it all the time. But imagine if you also make thought

external by following your thinking on paper or screen and not just in your head. Here is

some of what happens:

Inquiring into the Details
Invention Strategies

Invention is a term from rhetoric that means the act of generating ideas. While we typically

think of rhetoric as something vaguely dishonest and often associated with politics, it’s

actually a several-thousand-year-old body of knowledge about speaking and writing well.

Invention is a key element in rhetoric. It can occur at any time during the writing process, not

just at the beginning in the “prewriting” stage. Some useful invention strategies include:

· Fastwriting: The emphasis is on speed, not correctness. Don’t compose, don’t think

about what you want to say before you say it. Instead, let the writing lead, helping

you discover what you think.

· Listing: Fast lists can help you generate lots of information quickly. They are often in

code, with words and phrases that have meaning only for you. Let your lists grow in

waves—think of two or three items and then pause until the next few items rush in.

· Clustering: This nonlinear method of generating information, also called mapping,

relies on webs and often free association of ideas or information. Begin with a core

word, phrase, or concept at the center of a page, and build branches off it. Follow

each branch until it dies out, return to the core, and build another. (For an example,

see p. 80.)

· Questioning: Questions are to ideas what knives are to onions. They help you cut

through to the less obvious insights and perspectives, revealing layers of possible

meanings, interpretations, and ways of understanding. Asking questions complicates

things but rewards you with new discoveries.

· Conversing: Conversing is fastwriting with the mouth. When we talk, especially to

someone we trust, we work out what we think and feel about things. We listen to

what we say, but we also invite a response, which leads us to new insights.
 · Researching: This is a kind of conversation, too. We listen and respond to other

voices that have said something, or will say something if asked, about topics that

interest us. Reading and interviewing are not simply things you do when you write a

research paper, but activities you use whenever you have questions you can’t

answer on your own.

· Observing: When we look closely at anything, we see what we didn’t notice at first.

Careful observation of people, objects, experiments, images, and so on generates

specific information that leads to informed judgments.

· You have a record of what you’ve thought that you can return to again and again.

· As you see what you’ve just said, you discover something else to say.

· Because the process of thinking through writing is slower than thinking in your head,

you think differently.

· Because externalizing thought takes mental effort, you are more immersed in

thought, creating what one theorist called a state of “flow.”

As I’ve already mentioned, thinking through writing is most productive when you suspend

judgment, reining in your internal critic. You may actually do some pretty good thinking with

some pretty bad writing.

Using writing as a way of thinking is even more powerful if there is a system for doing it that

reliably produces insight. One method, which we could call a dialectical system, exploits two

different kinds of thinking—one creative and the other critical, one wide open and the other

more closed. So far in this chapter, we’ve focused on the creative side, the generating

activities I’ve called “writing badly” that restrain your internal critic. But you need that critical

side. You need it to make sense of things, to evaluate what’s significant and what’s not, to

help you figure out what you might be trying to say. If you use both kinds of thinking,

“dialectically” moving back and forth from one to the other, then you’re using a method that is
at the heart of the process you’ll use throughout The Curious Writer.2 Try the next exercise to

see how this might work for you.

2
For Greek philosophers such as Plato, dialectic was a way of arriving at truth through

back-and-forth conversation between two people who were open to changing their minds.

Similarly, the process of writing and thinking I propose here is a back and forth between two

parts of yourself—each receptive to the other—in an effort to discover your own “truths,”

ideas, and insights.

Exercise 1.5

Two Kinds of Thinking

1. ​ Let’s return to the subject you began writing about in Exercise 1.3—your

experiences as a writer—but focus on something that was probably part of your

response to the third prompt in that exercise: your experience with writing

technology.

Using Creative Thinking

Step One: What are your earliest memories of using a computer for writing? In your journal

or on the computer, begin by telling the story and then let the writing lead from there. Keep

your pen or the cursor moving, and allow yourself to write badly.

Step Two: Brainstorm a list of words or phrases that you associate with the word literate or

literacy.

Reread what you just wrote in steps 1 and 2, underlining things that surprise you or that

seem significant or interesting to you. Skip a line and move on to step 3.

Using Critical Thinking

Step Three: Choose one of the following sentence frames as a starting point. Complete the

sentence and then develop it as a paragraph. This time, compose each sentence while

thinking about what you want to say before you say it and trying to say it as well as you can.

· What I understand now about my experiences with writing on computers that I didn’t

understand when I started out is .

· When they think about writing with computers, most people think , but my

experience was .

· The most important thing I had to discover before I ­considered myself “computer literate”

was .

Reflecting

If you’re like most people, then the parts of this exercise where you creatively generated

material felt different than the part where you judged as you wrote. But how were they

different? How would you distinguish between the experiences of generating and judging?

Talk about this or write about it in your journal.

A Writing Process That Harnesses Two Currents

of Thought

The two parts of Exercise 1.5 involving creative and critical thinking were designed to show

you the difference between the two and also to simulate the shift between them, the shift

from suspending judgments to making judgments—something I referred to as “dialectical”

thinking. In the first two steps, you spent some time fastwriting without much critical

interference, trying to generate some information from your own experience. In the third
step, which began with “seed” sentences that forced you into a more reflective, analytical

mode, you were encouraged to look for patterns of meaning in what you generated.

As you probably noticed, these two distinct ways of thinking each have advantages for the

writer:

· Suspending judgment feels freer, is exploratory, and may spark emotion.

· Making judgments shifts the writer into an analytical mode, one that might lower the

temperature, allowing writers to see their initial explorations with less feeling and

more understanding.

Thus, creative thinking creates the conditions for discovery—new insights or ways of

seeing—while critical thinking helps writers refine their discoveries and focus on the most

significant of them.

The Sea and the Mountain.

Here’s another way to conceptualize creative and critical thinking (see Figure 1.2):

· When you write creatively, you plunge into the sea of information. You don’t swim in

one direction, but eagerly explore in all directions, including the depths.

· When you write critically, you emerge from the water to find a vantage point—a

mountain—from which to see where you’ve swum. From the mountain (which

occasionally erupts and belches forth two words: “So What?”), you are able to see

patterns that aren’t visible from the water. You are able to make judgments about

what you encountered there: What’s significant? What isn’t? Why?

Figure 1.2 Generating insight using critical and creative thinking.

Thinking to inquire is like the movement back and forth from the sea of information to the

mountain of reflection. In one you explore, and on the other you evaluate. Insight develops

when you continually move back and forth; as you refine your ideas, when in the sea, you

swim in ever smaller circles with a stronger sense of purpose.

The key is not to stay on the mountain. Instead, you take the patterns you saw and the

judgments you made and plunge back into the sea, this time with a stronger sense of

purpose. You’re clearer about what you want to know and where you need to swim to find it.

This back and forth between mountain and sea continues until you’ve discovered what you

want to say. In fact, you made just this sort of movement in Exercise 1.2 and then in Exercise

1.5 when you moved from generating to judging. It is a process of induction and deduction,

working upwards from specifics to infer ideas, and then taking those ideas and testing them

against specifics.

Figure 1.3 lists yet other ways in which you can visualize the movement between creative

and critical thinking. In narrative writing, for instance, creative thinking helps you generate

information about what happened, while critical thinking may lead you to insights about what

happens. Likewise, in research writing, investigators often move back and forth between their

observations of things and their ideas about them.

As you work through the book, you’ll find it easier to shift between contrasting modes of

thought—from collecting to focusing, from generating to judging, from showing to telling,

from exploring to reflecting, from believing to doubting, from playing to evaluating. In short,

you’ll become better able to balance creative and critical thinking. You’ll know when it’s

useful to open up the process of thinking to explore and when it’s necessary to work at

making sense of what you’ve discovered.

Answering the So What? Question.

An important function on the critical thinking side is to make sure you can answer the one

question you must answer when writing for an audience:

So what?

Figure 1.3 Alternating currents of thought.

When writers alternate between creative and critical thinking, they move back and forth

between two opposing modes of thought—the creative and the critical. One seems playful

and the other judgmental; one feels open ended and the other more closed. Activities such

as fastwriting and brainstorming promote one mode of thought, and careful composing and

reflection promote the other.

So what? can be a pretty harsh question, and I find that some students tend to ask it too soon

in the writing process, before they’ve fully explored their topic. A danger is that this can lead

to frustration. You may, for example, have found yourself high and dry if you’ve tried to reflect

on possible meanings of a moment you’ve written about for only eight minutes. Another

danger is that the writer is tempted to seize on the first convenient idea or thesis that comes

along. This abruptly ends the process of inquiry before the writer has had a chance to

explore.

When you can’t come up with an answer to the So what? question, the solution is usually to

generate more information.

A Writing Process Driven by Questions

The inquiry approach is grounded in the idea that the writing process depends, more than

anything else, on finding good questions to address.

I recently visited teachers in Laredo, Texas, and I told them that with a good question, even

the most boring topic can become interesting. I would prove it, I said, and picked up a lemon

that was sitting on a table and asked everyone, in turn, to ask a question about the lemon or

about lemons. Twenty minutes later, we had generated sixty questions. In the process, we

began to wonder how the scent of lemons came to be associated with cleanliness, why

lemons appeared so often in wartime British literature, why the lime and not the lemon is

celebrated in local Hispanic culture. We wondered a lot of interesting things that we never
expected to wonder about, because a lemon is ordinary. Questions can make the familiar

world we inhabit yield to wonder.

The point is this: There are no boring topics—just wrong questions.

But what are good inquiry questions? Obviously, for a question to be good, you have to be

interested in it. Furthermore, others must also have a stake in the answer, because you’ll be

sharing what you learn.

Usually, when we investigate something we don’t know much about, we start by asking

informational questions. Say you’re interested in the Disney Corporation’s sustainability

projects. You first need to know what those are. You might search online and read about

Disney’s commitment to recycling or to energy efficiency. This is basic background

information—facts about what has already been said about a topic. But in college writing,

you’re usually not writing a report or a summary of what’s known about a topic. Just

explaining what Disney is doing to reduce emissions isn’t enough. You have to do something

with that information. This involves that critical mind that we talked about earlier, one that

asks you to make judgments.

Different types of questions lead to different kinds of judgments. And it’s landing on the

appropriate type of question for your project that will launch you into meaningful inquiry.

These question types include the following:

· Value questions: Is it good or bad? Useful or useless?

· Relationship questions: Are they similar or dissimilar? Is there a cause and effect?

What’s the connection?

· Policy questions: What should be done?

· Interpretation questions: What might it mean?

· Hypothesis questions: What is the best explanation?

· Claim questions: Are the assertions valid? What is most persuasive?

You can apply these kinds of questions to nearly any topic, depending on what interests you

about it. For example, in Figure 1.4 I tried to imagine how someone exploring Disney’s

sustainability programs might use each of these question types. With a little factual

background, it isn’t hard to start framing possible inquiry questions that can really steer your

project in different—and possibly interesting—directions.

Figure 1.4 Categories of inquiry questions.

The inquiry process often begins with informational ­questions: What is already known about

this? As writers learn more about their topics, they refine their questions so that they are

more likely to lead to analysis or argument rather than mere report. Some of these questions

are ­associated with certain kinds of writing that are covered in this book.

A good question not only lights your way into a subject, but may also illuminate what form

you could use to share your discoveries. Certain kinds of ­writing—reviews, critical essays,

personal essays, and so on—are often associated with certain types of questions, as you

can see in Figure 1.4. In Part 2 of The Curious Writer, which features a range of inquiry

projects from the personal essay to the research essay, you’ll see how certain questions

naturally guide you towards certain kinds of writing.

A Strategy for Inquiry: Questioning,

Generating, and Judging

If you combine the power of good questions with the back-and-forth process of writing

creatively and critically, you have a strategy of inquiry that you can use for every assignment

in this book. The key is to alternately generate—topics, ideas, questions—and judge.

Typically, you begin exploring a subject, sometimes generating some initial thoughts through
fastwriting, listing, or other invention methods. But like landscape shots in photography,

subjects cover a huge amount of ground. You need to narrow your subject and eventually

arrive at a yet narrower topic, or some part of the landscape to look at more closely. As an

example, take popular music. That’s a huge subject. But as you write and read about it a

little, you may begin to see that you’re most interested in the blues, and especially in its

influence on American popular music. This last might seem promising as a general topic.

With a tentative topic in hand, you then need to search for a few inquiry questions about your

topic that both interest you and will sustain your project. These are the questions that will

help you focus your topic, that will guide your research, and that may eventually become the

heart of an essay draft on your topic. For example, beginning with the topic of the influence

of the blues on pop music, you might arrive at an inquiry question something like this

relationship question:

What is the relationship between Mississippi delta blues and the music of white performers such

as Elvis who were popular in the fifties and sixties?

An inquiry question may be no more than a temporary guide on your journey. As you

continue to write, you may find another, better question around which to build your project.

But beginning with a good question will get and keep you on the right track—something

you’ll find enormously helpful as you collect information.

Some of the best insights you get about what the answers to your questions might be will

come from the alternating currents of thought—generating and judging, suspending

judgment and making judgments—that energize your writing and thinking processes. In

practical terms, this means combining open-ended methods, such as fastwriting, to explore

what you think with more focused methods, such as summarizing, that will help you evaluate

what you discover.

Most of all, this inquiry strategy uses questions to direct your attention to what’s relevant and

what’s not. Imagine that an inquiry question is a flint that gives off sparks when it strikes
potentially meaningful information, whether that information comes from personal

experiences or research. These sparks are the things that will light your way to discoveries

about your topic. In Part 2 of this book, you’ll be led through this process in the last part of

each chapter, as you open up your thinking about topics (generate), narrow down those topics

through focused questioning (judge), try out various approaches (generate), think about

criteria (judge)—and finally, develop, draft, and revise your writing.

The inquiry strategy I’m proposing should work with nearly any topic. Let’s try one in Exercise

1.6.

Exercise 1.6

A Mini Inquiry Project: Cell Phone Culture

1. ​ The alternating currents of thought—generating and judging, exploring and

evaluating, opening up and focusing, mountain and sea—can be put to work in

any situation where you want to figure out what you think. Writing is a key part of

the system. In this exercise, I’ll guide you to think one way and then another.

Later, you may find you do this on your own without thinking about it. But for now,

let me guide you.

More than 90 percent of us now have cell phones, and according to one study, about a third

of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine say that they “couldn’t live without” them. Cell

phones make us feel safer, and of course they’re an enormous convenience. But they’ve

also introduced new annoyances into modern life, like the “halfalogue,” the distracting

experience of being subjected to one half of a stranger’s conversation with someone on their

cell phone. It’s a technology that is fundamentally changing our culture—our sense of

community and connection, our identities, the way we spend our time. But how? Try

exploring that question for yourself, to see if you can discover what you find interesting about

the topic.
Invention: Generating

Step One: Let’s first take a dip in the sea of information. Recent research on “cell phone

addiction” suggests that, as with Internet addiction, “overuse” of the technology can result in

anxiety, depression, irritability, and antisocial behavior. This ­research also suggests that

college students are particularly vulnerable to cell phone addiction. One survey to determine

whether someone is cell phone ­addicted asks some of the following questions:

· Do you feel preoccupied about possible calls or messages on your mobile phone,

and do you think about it when your cell is off?

· How often do you anticipate your next use of the cell phone?

· How often do you become angry and/or start to shout if someone interrupts you when

you’re talking on a cell phone?

· Do you use a cell to escape from your problems?

Start by exploring your reaction to this list in a fastwrite in your journal, print or digital. Write

for at least three minutes, but write longer if you can. What do you make of the whole idea of

“cell phone addiction”? What does this make you think about? And then what? And then?

Judging

Step Two: Reread your fastwrite, underlining anything that you find interesting, surprising, or

possibly significant. Pay particular attention to anything that might have surprised you. Then

thoughtfully finish the following sentence.

· One interesting question that this raises for me is: ?

Generating

Step Three: Focus on the question you came up with in step 2. Return to the sea and write

about specific observations, stories, people, situations, or scenes that come to mind when you
consider the question you posed. Don’t hesitate to explore other questions as they arise as

well. Let the writing lead. Write fast for at least another three minutes without stopping.

Judging

Step Four: Review what you just wrote, thoughtfully complete the following sentence, and

then follow that first sentence for as long as you can compose here, thinking about what

you’re going to say before you say it, rather than fastwriting.

· So far, one thing I seem to be saying is that we….

Finding a Question

Step Five: You haven’t generated much writing on cell phone culture yet, but if you’ve

written for ten minutes or so, you should have enough information to take a stab at writing a

tentative inquiry question. Using the question categories in ­Figure 1.4, try to draft a question

about cell phones, cell phone culture, cell phone addiction, or any other topic suggested by

your writing. Remember, the question should be one of the following:

· A value question: Is it any good?

· A policy question: What should be done?

· A hypothesis question: What is the best explanation?

· A relationship question: What is the relationship between and ?

· An interpretation question: What might it mean?

· A claim question: What does the evidence seem to support?

Reflecting on the Process

Step Six: In your journal, or on an online discussion board, answer the following questions

about what you’ve just drafted.

1. ​ What, if anything, do I understand now that I didn’t before?

 2. ​ What most surprised me?

3. ​ What’s the most important thing I take from this?

Reflective Inquiry About Your Writing

I should be a really good guitar player. I’ve played since I was eleven. I’m okay. But among

my other problems was a lousy sense of rhythm—at least until recently, when I began

playing with my friend Richard, who can play skillfully in all the ways I can’t. How did I solve

the rhythm problem by playing with Richard? What exactly did I learn to do that helped me

adjust my strum so I could provide passably good backup to Richard’s leads?

To get better at a process, we need to ask questions about it. And to answer these

questions, we have to have three things:

1. ​ Some knowledge of how the process is done or how it might be done

2. ​ The language to define the problem

3. ​ Some ideas about possible solutions

Since the beginning of this chapter, I’ve argued that taking the time to reflect on your

knowledge and think about writing, and paying attention to how you use this knowledge and

thinking as you write, is well worth the effort. It will speed up your learning, help you to adapt

more easily to a range of writing situations, and make writing less frustrating when things go

wrong. Experts call this “reflective inquiry,” and they observe that experienced professionals

in many fields often do this kind of thinking. In a way, reflective inquiry is thinking about

thinking. It isn’t easy. But it is also one of the most important ways in which we transfer what

we know from one situation to another. Reflective thinking is key to making the most of your

learning in this writing course.

You’ve tried your hand at reflective inquiry in several exercises so far, including the previous

one on “cell phone culture.” Let’s get a little more practice with it before we move on.
Exercise 1.7

Scenes of Writing

1. ​ Think about the writing and thinking you’ve done about yourself as a writer in this

chapter. Review your notes from all of the exercises you tried that asked you to

reflect on that (Exercise 1.1, your beliefs about writing; Exercise 1.3, your literacy

collage; and Exercise 1.4, the survey on your writing process). Now imagine the

kind of writer you would like to be.

Scene 1

A month ago, you got a writing assignment in your philosophy course: a twelve-page paper

that explores some aspect of Plato’s dialogues. It’s the night before the paper is due.

Describe the scene. What are you doing? Where? What’s happening? What are you

thinking? If you can, make use of the various types of writing that can convey scene: setting,

action, description, narration, dialogue.

Scene 2

Rewrite scene 1. This time, script it as you wish it would look.

Finally, imagine that each scene is the opening of a film. What would they be titled?

Reflective Inquiry

Think about the terms we’ve used in this chapter to talk about the writing process—terms

such as these:

· Prewriting

· Revision
 · Focusing

· Critical and creative thinking

· Invention

· Reflection

· Exploration

· Inquiry questions

· Habits of mind

· Suspending judgment

· Genre

· Alternating currents of thought

· Writing situation

· Rhetorical choices

Draft a 200- to 250-word essay or discussion-board post about your own writing

process—past, present, or future—that uses as much of the terminology of the writing

process as you find relevant and useful to your essay or post.

Using What You Have Learned

Remember the learning goals at the beginning of the chapter?

1. Reflect on and revise your beliefs about yourself as a writer.

In this chapter, you started to tell yourself the story of yourself as a writer. Like any

good story, you tell it for a reason: What does it tell you about the kind of writer you

think you’ve been? Is that the writer who will work for you now as you deal with a

wider range of writing situations in college and out of college? The great thing is that

if your beliefs about yourself are holding you back, you can change them. And you

will as you work your way through this book. Reflect continuously on what you do as
a writer that works for you (and on what you do that doesn’t). This isn’t just an

academic exercise; it is knowledge that you can put to work to help solve your writing

problems.

2. Understand what kinds of questions will sustain inquiry into any subject.

Academic inquiry is driven by questions that will keep you thinking. But what kinds of

questions will sustain your investigation of a subject over time? In this chapter, you

learned how you can start with an informational question—What is known about a

topic?—and refine that into a question that will help you discover what you want to

say. You’ll see later how these questions often lead to certain kinds of writing. The

ability to understand what kinds of questions will guide your writing and thinking is

something that you can draw on in nearly every college class.

3. Practice a method of writing and thinking that will help you generate ideas.

Throughout The Curious Writer, you’ll use the technique you were introduced to here:

using your creative mind to explore and generate material, and using your critical

mind to narrow down and evaluate what you’ve generated. As you get more practice

with this method, you’ll find that you may not even think about it but instead shift

naturally from withholding judgment to making judgments. If this works for you, you’ll

find that it’s a powerful way to use writing to discover what you think in nearly any

writing situation.

4. Apply rhetorical knowledge to make choices in specific writing situations.

In this book, rhetoric is never a bad word. You learned here that the term doesn’t

describe someone who blows smoke in an attempt to deceive, but rather represents

a way of thinking about how to communicate effectively. Rhetoric is a system for

analyzing writing situations by looking at purpose, ­audience, and genre, so that you

can see more clearly what your choices are when you’re composing any kind of text.

You already have considerable rhetorical understanding. Anyone with any skill in

social situations does. But as you become more conscious of rhetorical analysis,

you’ll discover how fundamental it is to speaking and writing well.