On Writing

My heart actually sank when I heard that I would have to take another writing class. I immediately thought of my experiences taking my English GCSE¹ in high school. The terrors of studying English literature: Ok, but did he actually mean that when he wrote it? I had always viewed myself as a creative enough person; I loved music and photography, and I had even edited some creative videos for friends and family. Yet I never thought of myself as a writer. It was just something I wasn’t suited for, I told myself.

I remember on the first day of class, I brought up the gripe of handwriting. All schoolwork and exams had to be handwritten, and I never really had beautiful, neat handwriting like some of my friends. In primary school, we had what was called a “pen-license”, which granted permission to students who could write legibly to write with a pen. I only received my pen license at the end of the year out of pity, because my teachers would rather we at least had some exposure to using a pen before we went off to high school. Upon reflection, the root of my gripe was not whether I could use a pen. It was a frustration with not being understood. When I edited a video that gave people goosebumps, made them cry, or made them laugh, I knew I had gotten my point across. I had never been able to add such a complexion to my writing.

I had studied Maths, Further Maths, Physics, and Computer Science for my A-Levels². As I got older, the range of subjects I studied narrowed, and naturally, I expected to specialize even more in College. While I may have been able to put off writing in the British education system, I certainly wasn’t going to be able to pull it off at Yeshiva University. The concept of cores and extra requirements that fall outside your degree, making maths students take writing classes, and English students take math classes, was admittedly quite overwhelming.

Suddenly, a problem that I had been shielded from in my recent few years of education had just become something I had to overcome. And to be honest, I’m glad it did. Even in my first semester, when I studied economics, history, and writing, I noticed improvements in my overall education and my ability to present myself. I have found a style I am more comfortable with, finding it easier to express my thoughts more truthfully and explicitly rather than trying to engineer a hodgepodge of words into a clumsily written paragraph.

During my exploratory essay, I enjoyed being able to say, “I don’t know, let’s find out the answer together”, rather than boiling down the problem into logic, statistics, and probability. They still found a place in my writing, but they were used to enhance my message and answer rather than as a binary yes-or-no. And I’ve already attempted to use the skills developed in exploratory writing across other writing assignments, even integrating them into thesis-driven essays.

Similarly, I discovered that giving good, constructive feedback is actually extremely difficult. You want to formulate your answer in an encouraging way, emphasizing that what has been written so far has real potential and that you can see the writer's dreams and desires. Yet it is your job to tell them what is going wrong. Almost like a carpenter, you have to shave off the rough edges of the wood in order to reveal the shape figure hidden inside of it. You can't be too harsh or too soft otherwise your result will look slighly off. Hey, look at that, I just used a simile!

To me, good writing has become much more academic and practical, placing great importance on formulation and reasoning behind your ideas, supported by reliable sources and well-researched answers, rather than simply coming up with a fun story and using literary techniques. I still recognize the tremendous value in such work, but I’ve tried it, and it wasn’t for me. It’s almost as if I’ve discovered a neat, elegant mathematical solution to writing, something that just feels right when you look at it. That is why I can confidently say that I am grateful for my FYWR course, and actually hope to continue writing (with plenty of math and coding, of course).