Why You Never Learned to Write

Many people go through school with good grades and yet will swear that they can't write. Their problems usually come from a deep misconception about how to approach writing. I mean, if you tried to use your toes instead of your fingers to play the piano, you probably would think you had no ability at music.Your fingers are much more flexible and powerful, so why would you use your toes?  Because that is what you were taught.


Well, the part of your brain that writes, or at least the part that invents narrative through abstraction and metaphorical representations using imagination, is your right brain. And most education fails miserably to engage that part of the brain. Some people learn to write despite the weaknesses of their schooling, but then some people like Mozart can play concert piano at age four.

Left Brain/Right Brain  People who know a little bit about the difference between the two halves of the brain say the left side is logical and the right side is creative. Jordan Peterson suggests that it is more useful to describe them as novelty seeking versus order structuring. A neurobiologist once described it a little differently. She used computer language and said the left side is a serial processor and the right side is a parallel processor. What she meant is the the left side works in a straight line. It stops to finish one task before it can go to the next. This can go very fast, and is extremely efficient in known situations. However, if it comes across an unknown, it stops completely. The right brain doesn’t get stuck because it operates within a field of associations. If you drive on a road and there is a big cow in the middle of it, you have to stop until the cow moves. But if you are driving in a field with a big cow, the cow presents no problem. You drive around it. Everything in your right brain connects to everything else, and it can get from here to there in many ways. The problem for the right brain is focus and detail. You are an expert at switching from left to right and back again. When you look at the forest, you are not looking at individual trees. If you shift focus to a specific tree, you lose sight of the forest as a whole.  Writing requires this shifting right/left balance and you should be able to do it effortlessly.

Left-Brain Education Education has a purpose. Teachers have very specific learning goals, and so they break the information into pieces and feed them to you one at a time. Then the points taught can be tested, and most teachers are satisfied. Yet the original purpose was not to teach you the pieces; the original purpose was to teach you the whole. The teacher may have shown you every tree, but has not taught you how to see a forest. Seeing the forest is a right brain leap of imagination and cannot be taught. It must be discovered. Teaching to the right brain means creating an environment where you can grow your concepts. Good teaching is like a petri dish filled with nutrients, water and warmth. And patience. The teacher must wait to see what each student grows and help each to connect that to the individual pieces of knowledge necessary for mastery.  

Language and the Brain Some subjects like math and science can be taught more easily through left-brain processes than other subjects like philosophy and art. Perhaps the hardest subject to learn through the left brain alone is language.  Language uses the whole brain. Take one word of vocabulary: cat. One side of the brain holds the mental picture of a cat and the sound of the spoken word. The other side recognizes the letters “c-a-t” and connects that to a definition.  For every single word you read or say, your brain does an amazing dance between the left and right brain. The process is constant and rhythmic like the way your car engine cycles between the cylinders to give you power. When the cylinders are timed perfectly, your car hums along and you don’t think about the engine at all. You are free to think about your driving. However, if even one cylinder is just the tiniest fraction off in its timing, the car will be noisy, will chug and buck, will stall, and at some point, refuse to go. Trying to learn anything to do with language using only one side of your brain fails the way trying to start a car with only half the cylinders functioning does.  Even if you get started, you bump and stall ever step of the way.