I want to talk about the basic mental action that you’re performing while writing an essay. That is, when you’re writing an essay, what is it that you’re actually doing, mentally speaking?
The short version is this: that when you write, you are taking ideas out of that foggy, nebulous region on the fringes of your mind—where everything registers as a feeling or flashing impulse—and you’re grabbing a piece of that fog and wrestling it back down into the region of your clearer, crisper thought, and then wrangling it into some defined shape so you can put it on the table in front of you, look at it, and maybe knock it into other solidified ideas.
And that’s basically what you’re doing when you’re writing an essay.
At this point, you might (quite reasonably) be thinking, “Alright, Fain, that’s an interesting metaphor, but what does that mean in real life? What does a ‘solidified idea’ even look like?”
Well, words. Solidified ideas look like words. Because that’s what words are; they’re solidified ideas (1). When you’re wrestling with that fog in order to put it into a manageable shape, what you’re trying to do is to put something into words.
And the thing is, you know this. You know this on a visceral level. It’s what happens when you’re struggling to write a sentence in your essay in a way that captures what you’re trying to get at. It’s what happens when you’re annoyed at something that your friend or family member has done, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is—you can’t quite explain what the person has done in a way that feels quite right—and when you finally do put it into words, it feels satisfying. And you probably hang onto those words that you’ve said, because the next time the person does that thing, then you have those words to cling to when you’re confronting the issue.
As far as I can tell, this struggle of articulation is a universal human experience. For some, it’s more of a struggle than for others, but the process remains basically the same: you’re taking ideas from the fog of feelings at the edge of your mind—because feelings are ideas, just in another form—and you’re working them into a usable shape, and that shape is words.
Okay, fine. But what’s the use of knowing this? How is any of this helpful to you as a first-year writing student? Well, at the very least, I hope it helps you realize that the confusion you feel while writing is as normal as it is possible for something to be. Indeed, encountering and making sense of confusion is the whole purpose. What would be the point of essay-writing if you weren’t ever confused about the ideas you were working with? So be confused, and then work through it. Just don’t be confused about why you’re get confused.
Also, talking about this solidifying-ideas-into-words things is another way of pointing out that you shouldn’t expect to have all of your ideas sorted out before you’ve tried to write them down. After all, if putting things into words is how you solidify ideas, then that means that writing your ideas down is part of the thinking process. So, write a rough draft: not because your teacher in high school told you to, but because the importance of writing a rough draft derives from a basic principle of human psychology, and, in this instance, you would do well to play by the rules that your brain has set for you.
At this point, if you’ve found this argument intuitively convincing so far, then you probably don’t need to read further unless you’re interested. I’m going to try to prove this idea—that solidifying ideas into usable form means putting them into words, and that this is a fundamental process in human psychology—by reference to empirical evidence that supports the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Frankly, I think it’s pretty interesting stuff, because it suggests that putting things into words is such a deep psychological process that it can help treat an incredible range of psychological disorders. That said, I’m mainly offering it as more proof for the idea I’ve already laid out. If you’re already sold on the idea, and you’re not interested in the connection to CBT, then you’re probably fine stopping here.
Anyway, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a very complex subject, but definitely one worth knowing about, given that it’s incredibly successful as a family of psychotherapies. It’s actually crazy how wide of a range of disorders it treats—everything from depression to schizophrenia to Tourette’s Syndrome to chronic pain (and much more). It’s not a panacea by any means, and it’s often used in conjunction with medication, but there’s no disputing the veritable mountain of empirical evidence supporting its effectiveness (2).
I’m not going to lay out all of CBT’s principles right here (3), but one of them is this: you hold deep, unspoken beliefs about the world and how it works (core beliefs) that, with enough careful attention, you can articulate into words so that you can examine them consciously. For example, someone with depression might hold a core belief that, as he worked with the therapist, he might eventually articulate it as “I am incompetent.” And then he could actually think about that idea more directly instead of letting it sit at the deep foundation of his thoughts, unexamined, where it would give rise to various maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors without being recognized as the source of such. (As I said, this is in no way a comprehensive overview of CBT’s principles, and you should not treat this as definitive psychotherapeutic advice.)
In other words, one of the things that CBT operates on is this notion that you can take thoughts that are only dimly registered—and I mean very dimly—and, by putting them into words, you can play with them and even, with time and thoughtful effort, change them. Here, again, we see this basic principle: that all (or at least the vast majority) of your unspoken, unformulated thoughts can be rendered into usable, examinable shape by putting them into words.
And what’s more, this principle seems to be so right, so fundamentally true, that it continues to operate in minds as wildly different as those with schizophrenia, depression, OCD, and a whole host of other psychological disorders (and indeed, does not seem limited to psychological disorders, as such). Generally speaking, when a strategy continues to work in basically the same way across such a wide range of differences, chances are that the strategy has got something very right on a very deep level. What that means for us is that the thought-articulation process—the process of taking confusing, foggy feelings and wrangling them into the shape of words—is embedded very deep in the human mind.
Footnotes:
(1) As I get further in my studies of rhetorical theory in my PhD work, I am becoming increasingly aware that there are some well-respected rhetoricians who would cry foul at me categorizing words as solidified ideas. Their reasons for disagreeing would vary; to some I might partially concede, and to others I would not. Right now, though, the bottom line is this: if any of these rhetoricians ever want to take their ideas about the rhetorical constitution of consciousness and reality, or about the irreducible signifying power of the sentence, or what have you, and try to boil those ideas down into a form that is both understandable and practically useful to first-year writing students, then they are more than welcome to start their own WordPress blog.
(2) In case you’re wondering about this evidence, Stefan Hofmann et al (2012) did a meta-analysis of 269 meta-analyses of studies on the effectiveness of CBT, and concluded that, yeah, it really works. In case it’s not clear what that means, a meta-analysis of studies is when you look through a bunch of studies to get a sense of the empirical findings on a certain topic. Hofmann et al. did a meta-analysis of those meta-analyses (a meta-meta-analysis, if you will). What we’re talking about is effectively a review of hundreds if not thousands of individual studies on the efficacy of CBT in all different situations, for different disorders, with different demographic groups, you name it. And the conclusion was that CBT was, on the whole, quite effective. That’s what I mean by “veritable mountain of empirical evidence.”
(3) I actually did this in my Master’s thesis, which you can find on the University of Virginia’s library website. The title is “Learning to Learn to Write: Adapting the Principles and Practices of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy into First-Year Writing Curricula.” That said, I think it’s actually restricted to members of UVA community until May of 2025, so in the meantime, I suppose you could look up sources from, you know, the people who actually invented CBT (Aaron Beck) and practice it as therapists. I mean, if you wanted to settle.
Thoughts on Essay Writing 