Seedy Thoughts

It's April, and most of you are in the early stages of drafting this semester's biggie paper. It's time to take all of that research, reading, and planning and transform your efforts into a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship. Okay, maybe not a masterpiece, but certainly you  intend to write an organized, fully-developed analysis and/or argument.

If writer's block is ever going to rear its ugly head, it's probably now. You know you're ready to start writing cohesive paragraphs that will eventually come together into a whole paper. Except that you're not. The ideas are in your head, but you just can't seem to get them on paper.

But, if you wait until you have a great sentence in your head before you start writing, you'll be waiting a long time. Why? Because complete, compelling, and cohesive thoughts almost never go straight from your brain to your fingertips. Instead, even the best ideas first get to paper in an immature form, much like a prize-winning tomato plant first hits the soil as a tiny seed. You have to plant this "seedy thought" before you can fully develop on paper the idea that you know is floating around in your head.

As Michael C. Munger states in his essay 10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly, "Don't worry that what you write is not very good and isn't immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don't just write down ideas." Your first few rounds of writing might be ugly, but they are essential phases in the learning process. In short, you have to write first to articulate your thoughts to yourself and only after that can you effectively write to communicate your ideas to others.

So, if you're struggling to write anything because you can't even seem to form an intelligible sentence, perhaps the problem is that you're waiting until you have a complete thought before putting anything on the page. No matter how incomplete, grammatically incorrect, or unintelligible that thought may currently be, jot down whatever you can get out at the time - that seed of thought will be there, ready to cultivate into a strong point to communicate to your reader, once you've had a chance to fully articulate your idea to yourself.