Why Writing?

Of all the things one can do to express themselves, writing by far is the greatest of all to me.  The thinking and rethinking of ideas requires a deep examination of the ideas that you hold dearly. One of my favorite writers and orators, Michael Eric Dyson, states it clearer and more eloquently than I ever could.

For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning comes clean—or as clean as one can make it.

Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. 

Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

-Michael Eric Dyson

Quote taken from the article, “The Ghost of Cornel West”.