Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
Ray Bradbury
With the end of the summer closing in, my teaching life begins to move into full gear. To this end, I am honored to have the chance to lead writing seminars for three college classes. These are mostly freshmen students, and it’s my job to help them better understand how to write academic papers that shine.
This is my approach to teaching writing. And as part of this, in almost every first class, I hand out the below, which explains why writing is important – not just for academics, but for later career success, and even more important, life enjoyment.
Also, buying into the idea that writing can have a host of benefits beyond a grade, is a great way to push the “muscle building” phase of getting back to writing, enduring the “pain” of creation, so to speak, until it becomes second nature….or your nature.
So without further elucidation, here’s 10 Ways Writing Makes Your Life Better, advice I have cobbled together from various sources over the years:
1. Writing clears the clutter from your mind
Getting Things Done author and TED speaker David Allen emphasizes that your mind is for processing, not for storage. Storage of information, after all, can be outsourced in any number of ways, including writing down your to-do list on a pad of paper. The insight underlying this is that attention is a finite resource, one that gets depleted over the course of a day. So if you’re walking around thinking about what you need to do next—rather than thinking about how you’re getting to get it done—you’re misspending your neurotransmitters.
2. Writing lets you make a bank of knowledge
Productive people take better notes: if somebody is dropping knowledge on you, writing down what they say allows you to commit your attention to next insight—rather than trying to remember the last one. Like the Chinese proverb says, you can trust the faintest of ink more than the strongest of memories.
As you take more and more notes on awesome things said and read, you can amass an awesome bank of knowledge. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said: Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
3. Writing helps you see your own growth
Journaling in particular helps you see how you have grown. Harvard Business School research director Teresa Amabile has discovered that people feel more engaged, more productive, and have a greater sense of meaning in their work when they record even the most miniscule of accomplishments within their days. She calls this the Progress Principle: the more you’re aware of your progress, the more involved you’ll feel in making it continue to grow—another reason to make a ritual of writing about what’s happened.
4. Writing helps you understand your life
University of Texas psychologist James W. Pennebaker has found that writing about their lives helps people to organize their thoughts and find meaning in their traumatic experiences—from people diagnosed with HIV to Vietnam veterans. This is crucial, since the more meaning you find in your difficulties, research shows, the more resilient you’ll be in over-coming them, which reminds us of how the happiest people often have the hardest jobs.
5. Writing helps you become wiser
The last reason to write about life: it helps you study your emotions, which makes you wiser, faster. “What we construct as wisdom over time is actually the result of cultivating that knowledge of how our emotions behaved,” says USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “and what we learn from them.” This reinforces Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s recommended first step for making better decisions: buy a notebook.
6. Writing can help you get a new job or a promotion
Good written communications skills will serve you well no matter where you choose to go in your career, whether you want to climb the corporate ladder or find a new job. The ability to communicate clearly and concisely is an increasingly rare commodity, and no hiring manager has ever turned down an applicant because the cover letter was too well written.
7. Writing can help you gain confidence and clarity
Laura Pepper Wu, writing for Forbes, recommends starting every morning with a nice, healthy “braindump.” Her term for this type of free-writing session encourages writers to get out all of their nonsense on paper — a practice she says “will leave you with a clear and sharp mind. You might also experience the added benefit in the form a boost in both productivity and creativity as a result.”
8. Writing can help you communicate better with friends and family
The practice of putting words down on paper can help clarify your thinking and improve your critical reasoning skills. Before approaching a potentially difficult conversation with a loved one, try writing down what you want to say first. “Thoughts and feelings are nebulous happenings in our mind holes,” writes Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, “but writing forces us to crystalize those thoughts and put them in a logical order.”
9. Writing helps you build positive habits
The satisfaction of achieving a goal, even if it’s just to blog twice a week for a year, is its own reward. “Just like going to the gym, I feel like writing is rewarding. When I finish a post or a short entry, I feel accomplished. It’s simple. No one likes going the gym, but it’s the feeling after that we all strive for. Writing is the same way. It leaves me accomplished,” writes George Dy, Jr., for Lifehacker.
10. Writing can help you let go and heal.
Holding onto our baggage causes stress, insomnia, depression and internal fracturing. The beautiful paradox of owning our stuff is that as soon as we do, the heart does this wonderful trick, and we’re able to let it go. I know I’m ready to surrender when I’m ready to write about something painful.
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