Academic journals and textbooks bore me. Academics tend to burden readers with facts and ideas. Ask high school and college students, “Who is your favorite teacher?” Without hesitation, the favored teacher teaches and entertains. Nothing changes lives more quickly than intelligent and well-intentioned passion.
Teachers and professors inspire students to study, or they should. Students and readers lose big-time when the text and the teacher bore. Drudgery depresses body and mind. Passionate interest and commitment exhilarates and changes the world.
When a teacher or professor tells personal stories and beliefs, students sit up. They listen, they learn, they mimic, they grow. Stories fascinate us because the storyteller entrances. Words, descriptions, and vocal ranges exhilarate and teach.
Facts are necessary.
Creative people learn the facts, and then break the rules when the rules are contrived or constricting. Artists of all types, put fissures in the temporal. For some, learning the facts becomes an inconsequential nuisance. For others, learning the facts becomes a consequential necessity.
Boundaries and patterns of thought make for coherence.
Some boundaries and patterns of thought should at one moment be honored, and the next moment broken. Bold thinkers push back on the facts, welcome risks, and break rules. The squeemish and compliant abhor risks, or fear their world will collapse when testing rules.
I don’t mean reckless abandon. I mean understanding the difference between rules that should not be tested or broken (such as stealing, murder, adultery) and patterns of thought or action that should be tested (such as the statement, “…but we always did it that way.”)
Testing the patterns, the typical, the routine is what article writers should consider. Instead too many article writers meander in the cold fog of internet marketing and website linking. Their motto: “I write to sell.” If you write to sell, you suck-in the unsuspecting and manipulate the desparate. You don’t teach, inform, or change the world of your reader.
Controlled and managed passion (not runaway emotion) gives a pulse to words and ideas.
“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.” – D. H. Lawrence
More Related Posts:
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser – Introduction
- “Three Cups of Tea” – Power, Passion, and Presence
- Do You Write or Just Think About Writing?
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