I’ve been asked over the past several years as an educator how students can become incredible writers, and my answer is this: students must have recurring systems that enable them to continuously think, deconstruct, and write in interesting and informative ways, for 10 minutes every day, for at least 6 months. Anything less than that won’t let the student untap their incredible potential for seeing and using words to explain complex, engaging topics. The second question I’m asked is: what’s so important about writing? This is when our conversation becomes interesting.
I usually point out that The Human Engineering Laboratory discovered that the only common characteristic among successful people in the United States is an unusually powerful grasp of words. That’s the only characteristic. People with the highest salaries earned the highest vocabulary scores, across all ages and circumstances! Moreover, good writing is one of the greatest indicators of high IQ because it demonstrates the ability to express abstract ideas in simple, clear, complete, and concise ways. It demonstrates the ability to recognize patterns and explain how they work.
I also bring up David Perell’s story of Louis Agustus, a 19th century Harvard professor. He would ask his students to go through an exercise every class: he would take out a smelly fish from a jar and ask his students to “look at the fish”. He would leave the classroom for some time, bewildering his students. He came back and then gave them a hint: “you can look at the fish, you can write about it, you can use your hands and eyes.” The students still had no idea what to do – they just wrote “there’s a fish swimming in the jar.” He continued this exercise everyday for the next several months. Something amazing happened. The students started noticing the fish’s paired organs, the skin, the eyes, the scales. They saw the complexity of the world, manifested within the fish. They shared metaphors and similies and hyperboles about the fish as it swam. The fish that once looked so bland, so boring, so unremarkable, was now a majestic creature, striking awe and wonder. Nothing had changed materially – it was just that the students became more and more capable of abstract thought. That’s what good writing is – taking complex, abstract thought and tying it into intelligible language.
This is my ultimate answer for why writing is important – words and sentences are the tools by which we grasp our realities, the thoughts of others, and the situations we’re surrounded by. The better we can comprehend the chaos around us and place it into manageable language, the better we can handle challenges and create high value.
Colleges, graduate schools, and job recruiters know that too! Why else would personal statements, common application essays, and networking emails be such important drivers of employment and acceptance?
Improving your writing means becoming acquainted with the innumerable verbal descriptors for the human experience, across thousands of years. It means expanding your understanding of consciousness. It means convincing others that you’re worth listening to. It means having the power to start changing the world.
Here’s another statistic – renowned educational psychologist Edward Thorndike discovered that the learning curve increases exponentially until 20 years of age, which is consistent with the prodigious of vocabulary retention for children. If you can learn writing and vocabulary well when you’re younger, you’ll be leagues ahead of anybody else for the rest of your life in school, the job market, and life.
This website is for both parents and students to learn how to radically improve their capacity to understand complex, abstract thought and put it on paper. It will entirely change the way you understand writing and academic success.
Let’s get started! Just fill out the form at the beginning of the website and let us know that you're interested in learning how to write better. We'll work with you to put you on the lifelong journey of becoming the incredible writer you can be.
All the best, and thanks for reading! - Naman
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