- Consider how Thompson’s ideas from “Public Thinking” connect to your everyday life. Which examples were more relatable or more convincing to you? Be specific. Feel free to use personal anecdotes and quotes from the text to support your reflective response. One example that really stood out to me was “we do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” I related to this because when I write in my journal I feel like I understand myself more when I read it back to myself. It is easier to reflect on people and our thoughts when we write things down. Another example I related to was “When you write something online-whether it’s a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone’s photo, or a thousand-word post-you’re doing it with the expectation that someone might read it, even if you’re doing it anonymously.” When I post something on Instagram, I always am thinking about what the audience will think about my comment and it draws me away from writing certain things. They force me to critically think in order to come up with a caption that will please them.
- After reading Thompson’s piece, how would you paraphrase his main argument in your own words? After reading Thompson’s piece, I feel that his main argument would be that writing helps us to read and understand everything better.
- Identify what do you see as the three most important claims, and discuss the evidence he uses to support these claims. Provide a quotation for each claim (use the “starter” template on page 73 of the reader). One of Thompson’s main claims is that writing improves your memory. Thompson asserts that the generation effect states that if you write something down you will remember it better. According to Thompson, For example, Thompson states that “Early evidence came in 1978, when two psychologists tested people to see how well they remembered words that they’d written down compared to words they’d merely read. Writing won out.” What he means by this is people who write things down versus people who just try and remember the information succeed better. Another one of Thompson’s main claims is that writing can clarify our thinking. Thompson asserts that “We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” According to Thompson, when we write things down we understand our thoughts better and it helps us develop a better style of writing for our own selves. For example, Thompson states that “”I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . .” What he means by this is the reason we write things down is to make the thoughts more organized and easier to understand. The last one of Thompson’s main claims is “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating.. from high school or college.” Thompson asserts that people nowadays write and read more than they did back in the letter writing days. According to Thompson, his mother refuses to use the internet and the last time she wrote a paragraph she could not even remember. For example, Thompson states that “Research suggests that even in the United Kingdom’s peak letter-writing years-the late nineteenth century, before the telephone became common-the average citizen received barely one letter every two weeks, and that’s even if we generously include a lot of distinctly unliterary business missives of the “hey, you owe us money” type.” What he means by this is the internet has helped us read and write more than we ever have before. In other words, the internet is actually doing something positive in our society and helping us think critically and write more clear thoughts.
- Identify two rebuttals (places where Thompson addresses opposing views). One rebuttal Thompson used was “this is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers, or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace.” He says this when he claims that society writes more now than back in the letter writing days. Another rebuttal he uses is “In fact, many people have told me they feel the audience effect kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers.” He is addressing the counterargument that having an audience can either help or hurt performance drastically.
9/18/18 Homework
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