Welcome to my new blog

The title Write-Think-Learn seems to summarize for me not necessarily the order of the writing process, but what writing can do to help everyone communicate better. My starting point is the famous E.M. Forster quote, which I paraphrase: "How do you know what you think, unless you see what you say?" In other words, there's something about writing that helps us better conceptualize and organize our thoughts. That's step one. The next is a corollary: If we write about what we know already (although most writers will advise you "write what you know" and I understand that) we won't learn. We write to discover: new words, new ways of saying things, new connections, maybe even new ideas. The following caveat is in order to bring us a little down from the clouds: "Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible." (Sir Anthony H. Hawkins) This is not to disregard the spontaneous: Bernard Malamud has said that "I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought." Think to plan, write clearly and intelligibly, develop the thought, learn something from it by the way it's written, allow for the spontaneous and the unexpected, but think about whether it "fits" with what you've set out to say. Later I'll devleop my profile, introduce myself, except to say I'm doing this for a professional development exercise...but who knows what it will turn into? I'm always learning...