Fluid, bold statements

The excerpt below is adapted from a 2004 book about famed film critic Pauline Kael written by an editor and critic who knew her personally.

An anecdote: one summer day not too many years ago, I was on Kael’s verandah, staring off vacantly, and seeing me through the screen door, she called, “What are you doing?” “Thinking,” I told her. (I wasn’t.) She said, “I only think with a pencil in my hand.” It was just a small joke, but it got at something. You sit down to review a work you’re not sure about your response to, and by the time you get up from your desk, you know what you think. It isn’t a matter of taking a stand and then coming up with an argument to defend it: the argument is more organic than that. As you connect your thoughts—as you try to make them coherent by the simple method of fixing your sentences, making the words flow, correcting imprecisions—an argument emerges. There may be beautifully vacant writing, but I can’t cite any beautifully vacant criticism. What I can cite is a lot of bad critical prose that thinks it can get away with its mediocrity by virtue of the (ostensibly) excellent quality of the thought behind it. “I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression,” the playwright Oscar Wilde has a character say as he rises from the piano. Perceptions that aren’t backed up by creditable prose are generally worthless, because writing isn’t just a conduit for thinking. Writing is thinking.

I only think with a pencil in my hand.

Although it was an overstatement (or perhaps just an oversimplification), we at Keep Your Book Open also try not to think about important matters without a tool with which to document those thoughts—a writing utensil, a device, a channel—in hand, at the desk, or atop a lap. There’s something about sitting down with a blank canvas (page), taking graphite or ink (or pixelated typeface) to its surface, and just stringing words together, discovering your own opinions as you go.

When it comes to preparing for the ACT with Writing essay portion, most American high schoolers need to augment their ideational fluency and associational fluency. Whereas a college essay is judged on its depth, reflective qualities, and sense of personal expression, a college entrance exam’s Writing (essay) portion is asking one main question: Can you string one sentence after another, maintaining a cohesive process of reasoning, in support of an ultimate conclusion, with little to no error?

Ideational Fluency: ability to rapidly produce a series of ideas, words, or phrases related to a specific condition or object. Quantity not quality is emphasized.

Associational Fluency: ability to rapidly produce words or phrases associated in meaning (semantically associated) with a given word or concept.

Being idea(-tionally) fluent is not easy, particularly while remaining grammatically correct. We rarely measure the extent to which, when prompted, a young person can fluidly create novel cognitive associations. But American young people need to practice writing, and speaking—and speaking through writing. People generally find it easier to write the things they’ve said before, say the things they’ve thought before, and think the things they’ve written, said, or thought before.

You had better get used to thinking with pen in hand. Crafting, refining, and substantiating whatever bold statements your mind can spin. Learn it. Live it. Why? Because test makers, University professors, and the public at large, demand it. Demand what? The crafting of bold statements, in fluid idiom, which adhere to most conventions—and in some circumstances, all conventions—of the prestige orthography and syntax1(spelling and grammar), and which play not only with big words but also with big ideas.

The last two paragraphs may be a bit vapid, but the fact that they were written in under 2 minutes is a clear indication of a writer with high degrees of ideational and associational fluencies. And that’s the main thing ACT essay readers are curious about. Can you string along successive words, clauses, ideas, and associations, while keeping yourself focused on one topic?