- Joined
- Jun 25, 2010
- Messages
- 7,063
- Reaction score
- 1,642
It's from a science blog! It's not a hokey ad, I swear!
That said, it's easy to see why this first article caught my eye:
Write Your Way Thin?
(ScienceBlog)
But after I read it, I realized the technique they're talking about is the same one discussed in the following articles:
15-minute Writing Exercise Closes the Gender Gap in University Level Physics
(Discover Magazine)
Simple Writing Exercise Helps Break Vicious Cycle That Holds Back Black Students
(Discover Magazine)
The idea here is that if someone is stressed about being a failure, it makes them more likely to fail.
In the latter two articles, the cause of the stress is due to individual students being afraid they're living up to some stereotype that claims that people of their category aren't as smart as people in some other category.
This stress causes the students to lose confidence, to fixate on external benchmarks instead of their internal goals, and to thereby do worse in their studies. And this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy both in terms of that one student's success and the stereotype within society.
And a short writing exercise reverses the trend! This is so cool!
(It's also very cool to see such clear evidence that racial and gender stereotypes are a head-fake and always were, but I digress.)
So it sounds like, if you're afraid of failing as a writer, one of the most potent things you can do is write out a list of all your most important values or traits as a human being, then spend fifteen minutes writing about why they are important to you.
And maybe this helps explain why writers are sometimes very good at being persistent in the face of depressing odds? We commonly do write about our values and why we think they're important. In other words, some of us have already been doing this exercise, for years, as part of our work as artists.
That said, it's easy to see why this first article caught my eye:
Write Your Way Thin?
(ScienceBlog)
But after I read it, I realized the technique they're talking about is the same one discussed in the following articles:
15-minute Writing Exercise Closes the Gender Gap in University Level Physics
(Discover Magazine)
Simple Writing Exercise Helps Break Vicious Cycle That Holds Back Black Students
(Discover Magazine)
The idea here is that if someone is stressed about being a failure, it makes them more likely to fail.
In the latter two articles, the cause of the stress is due to individual students being afraid they're living up to some stereotype that claims that people of their category aren't as smart as people in some other category.
This stress causes the students to lose confidence, to fixate on external benchmarks instead of their internal goals, and to thereby do worse in their studies. And this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy both in terms of that one student's success and the stereotype within society.
And a short writing exercise reverses the trend! This is so cool!
(It's also very cool to see such clear evidence that racial and gender stereotypes are a head-fake and always were, but I digress.)
So it sounds like, if you're afraid of failing as a writer, one of the most potent things you can do is write out a list of all your most important values or traits as a human being, then spend fifteen minutes writing about why they are important to you.
And maybe this helps explain why writers are sometimes very good at being persistent in the face of depressing odds? We commonly do write about our values and why we think they're important. In other words, some of us have already been doing this exercise, for years, as part of our work as artists.
Last edited:
