{"id":783,"date":"2012-05-08T09:52:01","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T14:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bly.com\/blog\/?p=783"},"modified":"2012-05-08T09:52:42","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T14:52:42","slug":"is-writing-the-hardest-form-of-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/general\/is-writing-the-hardest-form-of-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Writing the Hardest Form of Thinking?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In The Writer magazine (6\/12, p. 15), my favorite novelist, Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini), writes that &#8220;Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He continues: &#8220;It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This sounds nice, but do you buy his claim that good writing is really the hardest form of thinking? I think for most people, the hardest form of thinking is mathematics.<\/p>\n<p>My youngest son is a freshman at Carnegie-Mellon. He took a course in &#8220;calculus in three dimensions.&#8221; I would wager that calculus in three dimensions is more difficult for most students\u00a0than\u00a0English composition.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In The Writer magazine (6\/12, p. 15), my favorite novelist, Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini), writes that &#8220;Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.&#8221; He continues: &#8220;It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}