It's complex. Writing disciplines thought, and thought disciplines writing. The two must progress hand in hand.
Analytical writing is a method for achieving greater intellectual honesty. It includes the habit of giving evidence for assertions, of clearing up ambiguity, of putting causes before consequences, of replacing hand-waving with concrete facts. And so on.
But it's not failsafe. "The Xorbians are foreign interlopers, so we must hunt them down and kill them" is analytical writing. I think it would pass some of the more basic tests described in the Atlantic article. But it doesn't necessarily tell the truth, and this failing may be down to a want of ethics.
By contrast, "What do I think about the Xorbian issue? Live and let live" is not analytical writing. But it may be truer and more valuable.
Judicial and deliberative rhetoric in Greece demanded a backbone of analysis. But it wasn't by any means the whole of rhetoric.
Well, as stated, it's complex. One could write books...
I honestly have no idea how I would function as a self-analytical human being without the ability to wrangle my thoughts into text. I think I have a decent knack for it, but when I think back to high school I realise I was lucky to scrape through with passable written English. Even now at university most people I meet are severely limited writers, incompetent even. And I imagine the situation must be even worse among the wider population. Maybe this is a new way to think about literacy - not if you can read and write basic sentences, but can you argue, can you convince - are you comfortable on the page, can you dance with your words?
Let's just hope this will not swing the pendulum too much in the other direction. If kids were only taught creative writing and no structure, it is to be expected that a strong push on structure will give them an edge. But if they had been taught only structure from the start, insisting a lot on that in high school is bound to have smaller returns (or even negative ones, if they are then very weak in creativity).
The educational system is fond of taking things to extremes. Lockhart's Lament (www.maa.org/devlin/lockhartslament.pdf) probably applies equally well here.
Kids need to know why humans write, and the joy that can be derived through self-expression and communication. They also need to be taught the tools to express ideas and arguments (as those tools become pertinent). Finally, they need to be shown how the ability to communicate through writing can be useful to them in achieving their own goals.
It's frustrating to see the educational system constantly bang from one extreme to the other when I would hope it would be clear that a balance is required.
I went to a private high school that prided itself in its English (writing) classes[1]. I didn't know it then, and I wish I had found out sooner, but I loved writing.
I started to realize this in college. I went into university as CS and picked up a Philosophy dual major after one semester so I could write more.
During my final year, in every single interview I had I made the argument that mere communication is massively underrated in engineering fields and that my Philosophy degree (or rather my writing skills) made me a better communicator than most other software engineers. I think I can safely attribute this to at least a few job offers, as the argument seemed to take a lot of interviewers by surprise.
After my college experience I certainly think the two majors (or any STEM major plus a writing-heavy major) compliment each other. CS and PHIL as a combination seems only natural from the get-go, especially with the intersection of Logic. But I especially think PHIL compliments CS because in my opinion the largest deficiency in every other CS and engineering grad I've met is that they have a hard time communicating their ideas and debating others effectively. Philosophy (all writing really) helps with that. A lot.
I think writing out anything, even just your own thoughts on a subject, makes you a vastly more empathetic person, something most engineers I've met seem to desperately need. It's mind-boggling the amount of extremely smart people I've come across that nonetheless seemed to simply lack the concept of not-them.
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[1] The article says "The program would not be unfamiliar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950." I had 12 years of Catholic school, though not in the 1950's, I graduated HS in 2006, so I imagine some of the curriculum theory stayed put.
[2] I've found myself considering the humanities majors I've met far, far more socially capable than the engineer majors, almost to an embarrassing degree. I've always been quite the introvert, supremely shy as a child, but was totally unprepared for just how shy I would find others. My college (RPI) was known for being an introverted place and I met so many great people who almost literally never left their rooms. Great minds and personalities who were self-sequestered from the world.
It felt tragic sometimes. I met and found a lot of people that wanted to meet others but had a great fear of simply being in public spaces more and exchanging pleasantries. Others still, and this was not an uncommon opinion, would disparage the idea of small talk as useless. It's funny but, of all places, once I came to college and met enough varied and amazing people I became vastly, vastly less shy. It just wasn't worth it to be shy when there were so many great people to meet and listen to.
Look at what you wrote. You took the took the time to write and organize several paragraphs in order to make a convincing argument. Personally, I've been in hundreds of Internet debates over the years, some of which raged for days.
One obvious way to get people to start writing is to give them a forum like this where they can discuss and debate different topics. Teachers could review for misspelling, grammar, etc.
At the end of the debate, students could summarize or rewrite their opinions in long form.
That basically already exists on reddit. I would bet that the set of people who type thoughtful, deep comments like the GP and the set of people who communicate well IRL overlap quite strongly.
>After my college experience I certainly think the two majors (or any STEM major plus a writing-heavy major) compliment each other.
I've written about this a little bit, in essays like "How to think about science and becoming a scientist:" http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/how-to-think-about-... , but my main advice to students who ask "What should I do with my life?" is to major in a technical or scientific field and either double major or minor in a humanities field (English, philosophy, and history are probably optimal). Many of them are surprised, since I'm in English lit, but a lot of humanities subjects aren't taught very well and have been substantially watered down, and I suspect a lot of the real action in the intellectual world is in the sciences, or at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities.
For me, it's because writing forces you to get out of your head. When you write (presumably in language that people other than you can easily understand), you're forced to think about how others will read it. Ergo, empathy.
This is expanded even further when you begin to consider your audience ("So I'm writing for school children... how do I communicate this in a way that they will understand?" and so on).
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I don't think this is necessarily true for all writing, though. Political writing, press releases, thing of a nature where the point of the writing is to lead a person to a particular conclusion. Manipulation, in other words. I don't think I'd consider that process an empathetic one.
Your comment has made me wonder: does learning how to manipulate better require (or help you to) learn how to empathise better, strange as that may sound? Are better manipulators also good empathisers? I'd never thought about that possible connection before.
Effective communication hinges on empathy. We're taught to write well (maybe) in terms of style and coherence, but effective writing, which persuades or fully informs, depends upon being able to anticipate the concerns and questions of the reader and then address them for the reader. Good writing goes a long way to making your work more comprehensible, but ultimately effective writing anticipates the reader.
Analytical writing is a method for achieving greater intellectual honesty. It includes the habit of giving evidence for assertions, of clearing up ambiguity, of putting causes before consequences, of replacing hand-waving with concrete facts. And so on.
But it's not failsafe. "The Xorbians are foreign interlopers, so we must hunt them down and kill them" is analytical writing. I think it would pass some of the more basic tests described in the Atlantic article. But it doesn't necessarily tell the truth, and this failing may be down to a want of ethics.
By contrast, "What do I think about the Xorbian issue? Live and let live" is not analytical writing. But it may be truer and more valuable.
Judicial and deliberative rhetoric in Greece demanded a backbone of analysis. But it wasn't by any means the whole of rhetoric.
Well, as stated, it's complex. One could write books...