Writers' Wiki

A person's inner world is quite remarkable. You have all these incredible ideas, feelings, and thoughts in there, floating in your brain. They make up the person that you are. Your mind, by all means, is quite cool.

The sad thing is that this genius is all locked away, accessible only to you. I will never know what's going on in there, just as you'll never know my inner world. We can never experience what it is like to be someone else, to have their thoughts and feelings, to see the world as they see it. This is the unfortunate truth of our reality: you'll only ever know your own inner world, and your inner world will only ever be known to you. Our minds are private and isolated.

Language, however, can act as a mediator between your mind and mine. You can create a representation of your inner world in the form of words, and by speaking them to me, that mental image can be recreated in my head as well. This is wonderful! Through speaking, we can share ideas, feelings, and thoughts, recreating them in other people's minds. Words are truly wondrous, powerful things. Speech, the sounds we create, are symbols for the things in our soul. Using this system of signs is the closest we can get to reaching each other's inner worlds.

But there is a flaw in speech. You cannot be everywhere at all times. You can't always be there to walk someone through your thoughts. Not to mention how exhausted you would become repeating yourself all the time. The weakness of speech is that it is bound by time and space.

This problem was recently solved by the invention of audio recording. But we didn't always have this. An earlier solution was to represent speech with symbols. "Isn't speech already a system of signs used to represent our mental experiences?" you ask. Yes, and writing is a further layer of symbols on top of that. Writing is a system of signs representing a system of signs representing your inner world.

Writing is quite incredible if you ask me. Not bound by time and space, I can translate my thoughts to you without needing to be around. I can be long dead, and parts of my inner world would still be accessible to you through my writing. Aristotle, Caesar, Shakespeare, Voltaire; we still have access to these great minds because they wrote things down. This is quite something, isn't it?

Unfortunately, there is another flaw, present in both speech and its symbolic representation. Because your inner world is so infinitely complex, mere words cannot do it justice. Language is limited, it can never represent your inner world one-to-one. As it can only approximate, some meaning will always be lost. And so what is recreated in my mind will never be as vivid and complex as it is in yours. That is just the nature of language.

Not all is lost, though. While we can never fully translate our thoughts through language, we should not give up on words. We can learn how to better use language, spoken or written, to better represent our inner worlds. Rhetoric, poetry, grammar; all can teach you how to use language more effectively, and give you the ability to share your inner world as it appears to you. Learning how to write gives you the skill necessary to express yourself well.

Allow people to peek into your incredible mind. Share your thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Your experience of being alive is unique and worth sharing. But you must learn how to do so effectively! So, learn how to write!

Hopefully, I could sell the beauty of language and writing to you in this pitch. If you follow the link above you will find a compilation of resources, books, tools, and essays that you can use to teach yourself how to write well. Think of it as a giant bibliography or syllabus. This is an ongoing project for me; every time I find something cool, I add it to the site. So it's worth bookmarking it and returning every once in a while to find new materials.