know nor care about something, we look toward an authority—the rulebook. Another common response to this writing will likely be, “This spoiled, self-centered kid is not taking any responsibility for himself, blaming his father for everything!” This may be wholly or partly correct. I have no idea. The third common response is likely to be, “This is not real writing; it’s a rant, a mind-dump—just another piece of Dear Diary trash.”
Of these three common responses, the last one is closest to the truth. But, it’s misguided because there is nothing wrong with “rants,” “mind-dumps,” or even “Dear Diary Trash”—if you believe that fluency and self-disclosure promote thinking and health, as abundant research tells us (e.g., Pennebaker 2004; Singer and Singer 2008).
“Mind dumps” may not be pretty, but they start the generative sorting-out process, which leads to a less fragmented self. While we may not like what this young man says or how he says it, at least he’s fluent enough to begin the process of the writing-thinking cycle. Would his writing improve if he supplied and evaluated evidence? Definitely. Would his writing benefit if he revised, qualified, and elaborated his ideas? Absolutely. But if we don’t have language fluency first, then we’ll never get close to thinking and revising and reflecting—and a less fractured sense of self. How, then, are language and other symbol systems connected to thinking?
While I never separate these two crucial processes, they are commonly put into different boxes, often on different shelves. Among many others, Judy Willis, though, links writing with higher-process thinking:
Consider all of the important ways that writing supports the development of higher-process thinking: conceptual thinking; transfer of knowledge; judgment; critical analysis; induction; deduction; prior-knowledge evaluation (not just activation) for prediction; delay of immediate gratification for long-term goals; recognition of relationships for symbolic conceptualization; evaluation of emotions, including recognizing and analyzing response choices; and the ability to recognize and activate information stored in memory circuits throughout the brain’s cerebral cortex that are relevant to evaluating and responding to new information or for producing new creative insights—whether academic, artistic, physical, emotional, or social. (Willis 2011, 1)
The language most often used for critical thinking, as well as “healing”—what Willis describes as “evaluation of emotions, including recognizing and analyzing response choices”—is, you guessed it, expressive language, the very “Dear Diary Trash” we love to hate. In addition to those expressive elements that Truman demonstrated in the earlier passage, expressive language is also marked by condensing or packing a lot of meaning into a few words, which only the writer can completely unpack.
Another primary characteristic is asking yourself questions and trying to answer them, even providing several possible answers. Along with speculating and hypothesizing, other elements include expressions of doubt and qualification, litany or listing, and metaphor. In short, thinking on paper or screen. Expressive language is much like Lev Vygotsky’s (1986) concept of “inner speech,” one of the major ways in which we think (Britton et al. 1975). In the following excerpt from Claire’s paper, she wonders about her sensations when being raped. We can see the cogs and wheels in motion. We can hear her thinking on paper.
I’m trying to figure out why I got pleasure from that. It could be that I enjoyed the time with Kent. He hated me, Darla, and Trish so much when we were little. But, I adored him. I wanted to be just like him. I thought he was cool and that he knew everything. Maybe that’s why I did it. I don’t know.
I’m lying. I’m lying. I’m lying. I do know why I did it, but I’m scared of how people will judge me if I say it, write it, or even think it. Putting on this “I need his attention” act is just to cover up and suppress the truth. I’m embarrassed about how I really feel. But if you must know . . . I did it because I enjoyed that tingling feeling. You know? That tingling feeling? The kind they warn children about on “The More You Know” commercials? Well, those commercials implied that the tingling feeling was bad and that it would hurt you. It didn’t hurt me. . . .
I feel as if something is wrong with me. How could I allow a family member to turn on me? The thought of it sickens me to my stomach. I keep trying to tell myself that I’m not weird and that if anyone or anything touched a woman’s privates, she would get excited, right? My body was responding normally, right? For whatever reason, this explanation doesn’t settle with me. How could a little girl like being molested? I know what you’re thinking, “You were only seven. You didn’t know any better.” Well, that’s what I kept telling myself for years, but it’s not working anymore. I’m old enough to assess the situation. Do women like being raped? If they do, is it still rape? I finally realized that I was old enough to know it was wrong, and I was old enough to make a conscious decision to return to him. So, what do you think? Do I still deserve your sympathy . . . empathy . . . or whatever it is?
. . . .
When other people share their experiences, I keep my mouth shut. Generally, they feel that something was stolen from them. I can only empathize. I don’t feel that Kent took something from me. If anything, I gave it to him. I was a willing participant. Does this qualify me as a victim? (Course Documents 2003)
Such expressive language may not supply easy answers or resolutions to dilemmas (though it happens), as we want Claire to learn about the social and cultural forces that have conditioned women to submit quietly to men. Nonetheless, expressive language does lift burdens off of our shoulders, rendering problems visible, giving them shape and form, so that we can better see them and define them and analyze them in different ways. This unburdening, in turn, helps us distance ourselves, rhetorically and emotionally, from the trauma in question. In an opposite way, expressive language also functions as a more direct conduit to our feelings, emotions, and thinking. Demystifying problems makes them less scary. It is an act of unifying or “suturing” our splintered selves, so that we can become more whole (Anderson, Holt, and McGady 2000, 58–82).
When we somehow distrust our readers, we not only censor ourselves, but we also produce fewer words, in total, as well as fewer words per minute (e.g., Elbow 1998). This lack of fluency often means that we cut short the time and language we need to arrive at our intended meaning. That is, visible language generates more language and more thinking, in turn extending the thinking-writing cycle. We need to generate enough ideas in our writing to discover exactly what it is we want to say, what we most need to write. If we lack fluency, then we’re likely unable to generate enough detail to more fully comprehend it and to analyze it, or to revise it in productive and healing ways.
The reverse is also true: When we indeed trust our readers, we gain confidence in ourselves as writers, have reduced fears of evaluation, and hence increase our production rate. The writers in this study always trusted their readers (if they were even thinking of their readers), and therefore were highly fluent, providing extensive diaries, email messages, and website postings.
Being committed to the topic we’re writing about also affects our fluency and thinking. We have to be invested in our subjects, cognitively and emotionally. This occurs when we have complete freedom in our choice of topic, purpose, and audience, as did the writers explored in this book. Under these circumstances, we can become deeply absorbed in our activities, to the point of becoming unaware of the passage of time and of our immediate surroundings. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls these “flow experiences,” which become intrinsically rewarding for us—the best kind of motivation, which, in turn, promotes writing fluency and thinking.
Even the processes we engage in as writers influence our production rate and thinking. Research on composing processes reveals that writers constantly engage in mentally shuttling back and forth between larger “global” plans, such as audience appropriateness and organization—and smaller “local” concerns, such as word choice and syntax (Perl 1994; Flower and Hayes 1989).
When
