It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.
—Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
✏️ The 2nd Amendment
Writing is fundamental to intellectual life. One can read, study, and collect notes as much as he likes — and these have their place — but there inevitably comes a time when one must pick up his pen and produce.
Passive consumption of information, crafted and curated by those with their own views, style, and agenda, characterizes the modern age. TikTok and the YouTube short are the consequences of a technological society that no longer has the patience to fight with ideas and knock at the door of original thought. Writing is precisely the remedy required in such a time, combining rhetoric, vocabulary, and reason steeped in age and reflection. This forces him to think: he who seeks to effectively expound or defend his view does so under the limitations of his lexicon, driving him to develop himself in order to make himself heard. Each part of the written piece — from the structure of the whole, to the placement of the sentence, to the choice of words — must be deliberate & non-superfluous in order to achieve maximum clarity and impact. The serious writer knows this, and knows that much toil is required to extract the diamonds from the quicksand of his mind.
Acknowledgement of the limitations of the mind is critical if one wishes to become a good writer. Discipline is the making of the man, and continual and mandatory writing time is as necessary as physical exercise. One must make time for writing as one makes time for sleeping and eating. And when the writer finds himself headstrong in his beliefs, he must turn back, knowing he has gone too far along the path of surety and must attack his perspective from alternative viewpoints.
The training of rhetoric improves the writing process. A good writer must go beyond mere explanation: he must make his words sing, grasping the hand of the reader and carrying him along through the exhibition, showing him each point in the proper order. It is the job of the writer to compel the reader to read on, and to make his work understandable to the ears of all, regardless of prerequisite knowledge.
Any good citizen must arm himself with the capacity to think and therefore by necessity develop his capacity to write.
Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim.
💡 Food for Thought
🧬 Paper of the Week — Beyond General Arousal: Effects of Specific Emotions on Memory
Citation: Levine, Linda J., and Stewart L. Burgess. "Beyond general arousal: Effects of specific emotions on memory." Social Cognition 15.3 (1997): 157.
This research examined the effects of happiness, anger, and sadness on participants' memory for different types of information in a narrative. Happiness and negative emotions were evoked in 263 undergraduates (aged 17–29 yrs) by randomly assigning grades of "A" or "D" on a surprise quiz. Immediately afterwards, Ss participated in what they believed to be an unrelated study during which they heard and recalled a narrative and described their emotional state. Ss in the positive emotion condition recalled more of the narrative as a whole than did Ss in the negative emotion condition. Analyses based on self-reported emotions indicated that happiness had a general facilitative effect on recall, whereas anger and sadness were associated with enhanced recall of information concerning goals and outcomes respectively. Findings indicate that specific emotions differ in their effects on memory and that negative emotions may facilitate selective encoding of functional information.
AT