In all my life that I have been writing essays, I have followed a certain guideline. It was always, say your thesis and then prove it. So, naturally, I would just look up other people’s thoughts on my own thought and use their thoughts to somehow prove my thought. However, “Writing Analytically” by David Rosenwasser showed me that this kind of “proving” and writing is really not the right way to do things. In Chapter One, Rosenwasser talks about how writing is a thought process. It is just a form of you expressing your thoughts in a developed and coherent way. While I may have manipulated other people’s thoughts to fit with my own and “prove” my point, I failed to realize that it was my own thoughts that would really get the job done.
One line that stood out to me was “Judgments usually say more about the person doing the judging than they do about the subject being judged.” Here is, yet another thing, Rosenwasser pointed out that I have never considered before. Judgments are supposed to be thoughts on another person. However, the other way to see this is by realizing that a judgement is made based on ones own opinion on certain situations. That’s how it turns out that a judgment really tells more about the person judging than the person being judged.
One last thing that stood out to me was the point to look for anomalies. Since I usually wrote to prove through other peoples works, I also tended to skip over all of the things that did not tie into what I had to say. However, I too never realized how doing so would prevent me from reaching an even greater idea. This all, I feel, goes back to writing being a thinking process. By trying to manipulate my writing and what is in it, and not letting it just flow hinders my pieces from being good writing pieces. If I was more open to this thought of just thinking, then my writing would probably improve exponentially.
