The second chapter entitled Aprender a escribir in Jaime Nubiola’s book El taller de la filosofía offers great practical tips on how to put into writing those precious thoughts that come to us. But again, like the first chapter, it has brought me to reflect (another examination of intellectual conscience) on how I write.
The first point of my reflection is something basic: penmanship. We learn at an early age the fundamentals on how to write our ABCs. I remember the sense of triumph of learning how to write my name and finishing first in my class in writing it. Of course, having only three letters for my name helps with the speed. But if there is one thing I am ashamed of myself, it is my bad penmanship. It is a constant cause for embarrassment and ridicule. I sometimes joke around this impediment by telling people that my writing is in Greek or Sanskrit or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It also exasperated a number of my teachers in the past leading one to say to me indirectly, “A bad penmanship is a sign of illiteracy.” Of course I would try to justify that a number of great scholars have bad penmanship. Take for example, the great St. Thomas Aquinas who wrote Latin with a littera inintelligibilis, an “unintelligible lettering”:
Of course, St. Thomas was a genius. His thoughts were so fast that his writing cannot keep up with it. So citing him is not a very good excuse for bad handwriting. But my point is that a writer should write legibly. How can he transmit his great ideas if people cannot even read what he writes? Yes, the advent of computers is a gift from God. With these machines, not only can one have a clear and clean writing but also one can choose from hundreds of fonts and sizes in which manner to write. But the easiest way to write is still through a pen and a paper. There is something personal about it and while a computer facilitates one’s writing, there is a certain detachment when one just simply press buttons on a machine. Also, great ideas come and go streaming in our thoughts sometimes in rapid succession. And there is a danger of losing these precious ideas if we do not put them into writing. So a pen and a piece of paper must always be at hand . . . plus a good penmanship. Having a good penmanship is in itself an inspiration for one to write more.
The second thought that came to me is KISS. Before one gets any wrong idea, let me explain that I have not written that many articles or any books for that matter but I did deliver hundreds of homilies to a vast array of audience. And one element in preaching is how to connect with one’s listener. In the case of writing, the question would be how to connect with one’s reader. My teacher in homiletics gave me this helpful advice: KISS (Keep It Short and Simple). One classmate even told me that a homily should be like a woman’s skirt – long enough to cover the essential but short enough to be interesting. But underlying this advice is the insistence on clarity and conciseness. Our thoughts should be delivered with a certain clarity that the listener (or reader) can understand. There is no point of embellishing our words when the audience cannot comprehend them. We might be interpreted as simply grandstanding. Brevity or conciseness with our words now becomes a necessity in an age when a great majority of the people has a short attention span. Also, there is a limit to what the people can remember. What is the point of putting across great multitude of thoughts and ideas if in the end the people can’t remember anything what you said or written. We must learn to limit what we are to say or write, not simply for our sake but mainly for the sake of our audience/readers.
Finally, like the art of delivering a homily, the art of writing is a trial and error process. Sometimes there are more failures than success in learning to master it. That is why there is a need for practice, practice and more practice. One can only hope to improve in time by experience. I do not know all the techniques on how to become a successful writer but one thing I know is that the surest way to fail is by not trying to write anything at all.
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