On Writing
A letter to myself… Ramblings on knowledge, ideas and writing
My first reader is myself. Why am I writing? For myself, to help me manage my knowledge; help me to structure my thoughts; help me to get a trace of what I thought at a specific time in my life. Why now and not before even later? I really don’t know. I just start to find the benefit of writing. How I found it? By writing; as a child I wasn’t literate oriented; I was playing in the woods, hunting everything that moved. Eventually I worked in a library. I was young; I hadn’t really read books by myself before. I checked them, I manipulated them and I fall in love with them. Since then, I was ordering hundreds of books at my local library and at Amazon; books on any type of subjects. Since then, hundreds, thousands of worlds opened to me at once. I was privileged to be in touch with other human beings’ ideas. If someone writes a thing, it’s because there is an idea behind it. Ideas are the fuel of Knowledge. Reading something is trying to get the fuel to understand the knowledge generated by it combustion. The possibilities are awesome. You can get the knowledge you just learn, get it as is; interpolate from it; extrapolate from it; infer with it; put it in relation with other bit of knowledge you have; then find new knowledge or meanings. Everything can be knowledge; knowledge is everywhere just waiting to be understood. Writing is a way to understand it, to communicate it and to archive it.
People that had read my about section know that I started to write this blog to increase my English skills. Why do I write on security? Because it’s a field of interest and that I have things to write about. Sometime I can be right; sometime I can be wrong. In both cases the aims are the same: learning, understanding and sharing.
Do I have readers other then me? Probably some. Do people syndicate my blog? I don’t have idea. Do people like what I write? Some possibly, other no. Do I care? I’m not too sure. I first write for myself. I share on the web what I write in the case that one person can find one of my thought useful to himself. If I upgrade my English skills by writing this blog, if I learn from my search and from others’ comments and if I succeed in being understood then my goals are fully reached.
I bought the Oxford’s essential Guide to Writing this Christmas. I just started to read it in parallel with The Da Vinci Code (Yeah I know, I’m a little slow on this one) and I found it a really interesting writing. Thomas S. Kane gets to the point and had written some really interesting things that everyone loves been remembered:
… And so people say, “I can’t think of anything to write about.”
That’s strange, because life is fascinating. The solution is to open yourself to experience. To look around. To describe what you see and hear. To read. Reading takes you into other minds and enriches your own. A systematic way of enriching your ideas and experiences is to keep a commonplace book and journal.
I’ll also rewrite his introduction that is really inspirational:
Two broad assumptions underlie this book: (1) that writing is a rational activity, and (2) that it is a valuable activity.
To say that writing is rational means nothing more than that it is an exercise of mind requiring the mastery of techniques anyone can learn. Obviously, there are limits: one cannot learn to write like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. You can’t become a genius by reading book.
But you don’t have to be a genius to write clear, effective English. You just have to understand what writing involves and to know how to handle words and sentences and paragraphs. That you can learn. If you do, you can communicate what you want to communicate in words other people can understand. This book will help by showing you what good writers do.
The second assumption is that writing is worth learning. It is of immediate practical benefit in almost any job or career. Certainly there are many jobs in which you can get along without being able to write clearly. If you know how to write, however, you will get along faster and farther.
There is another, more profound value to writing. We create ourselves by words. Before we are businesspeople or lawyers or engineers or teachers, we are human beings. Or growth as human beings on our capacity to understand and to use language. Writing is a way of growing. No one would argue that being able to write will make you morally better. But it will make you more complex and more interesting—In a word, more human.
Is there anything that I can say after these words? Only one thing, Have a happy new year!