Sincerity and Doubt in Writing

Everyone has been forced to write a paper on a prompt that they felt they have no connection to or interest in. I don’t remember how many times I’ve sat for hours in front of my computer screen, trying to just think of theses for papers in my history classes. How was I supposed to feel about the impact of a battle on the economy of a faraway nation? Or the implications of the cultural values of a people from centuries in the past? I knew these were important matters, but the problem was that I just wasn’t feeling it. Writing about history frequently felt like a chore because the prompts were often too specific for me to take the essay in my own direction, and my resulting essays often seemed monotonous as I would review them before turning them in. I wasn’t a history person, I was a science person; I would much rather have preferred to write about how pathogens can mutate, and what implications this has on the medical field.

It is well-known that writing is most effective when it is sincere. When an emotion is truly present in writing, whether it is happiness, sadness, frustration, or anger, it is usually easy to tell through the vocabulary choice, sentence structure, and metaphorical devices, all of which contribute to the tone and style of the author’s voice. Even if the emotions are so strong that they may be considered to equal the point of madness, such as is present in the poets mentioned in Joshua Mehigan’s “I Thought You Were a Poet,” there is honesty and sincerity that allows for writing to come naturally and powerfully, resulting in a lasting impression upon the readers—and that’s what a goal of writing should be: for the reader to retain the information so that he or she may be affected by the writing in some way. However, when the feeling is not there, it’s hard to get even the technical things right; it’s not easy to find the right words to describe something that we don’t even believe in, and it can be difficult to even formulate what we are trying to say. Phrases end up coming out awkwardly or complicatedly in order to make up for this lack of passion, and instead, the writing becomes dull, superficial, and monotonous. After all, how can we interest readers when we don’t even feel interested by our own words?

While it is important to be confident in your true feelings in writing, it’s also important to doubt your thoughts, as Phillip Lopate stated in “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt.” Forcing yourself to think about what you feel, and questioning why you feel this way allows for further development of ideas. I think that every thought, no matter how absolute, could use some doubting because each idea is connected to so many other ideas in so many ways that there is always more information to be gleaned, more logical support and evidence to be found. But how do you doubt your own thoughts if you already feel so sure of yourself? This can be done in many ways; reading about opposing viewpoints or controversial topics and getting to know other perspectives can provide a means to find flaws in these ideas, in turn strengthening your own ideas. Or maybe you can find something that changes your own viewpoint on a particular issue; after much speculation, you might find a flaw in the thought process, a better alternative idea, or a completely opposite viewpoint altogether. Ideas may change, but this doesn’t mean that it is no longer your own thought; it just means that the thought has been thoroughly self-scrutinized and a deeper level of understanding of your thoughts and yourself has been attained.

The process of effective writing is difficult. It requires honesty in emotion and beliefs, as well as a certain hesitation in these same ideas; while it is important to be certain of how one feels about the topic of the piece of writing, it is also important to be aware of the validity of one’s viewpoint, and possible opposing perspectives. Above all, it is essential to present one’s ideas so that they are lucid and meaningful to the readers through sincere and carefully questioned writing. Writing not only communicates ideas, but also generates new ones, as different readers interpret words in different ways.