Rough Draft Intro and 1 Body Paragraph

Clive Thompson is the author of the book Smarter Than You Think, which contains the excerpt “Public Thinking” as one of its chapters. The purpose of his project is to answer the underlying question of “how has the evolution of public writing affects and influences people’s thinking?” Thompson’s main argument is that public forms of writing change humans’ cognitive behavior. Through various sub claims, such clarified thinking, audience effect, multiple effect, and memory, Thompson backs up his main argument to make people understand and believe the points he is trying to make. In my analysis of Thompson’s text, I will examine and break down those sub claims to further understand his main argument. 

Thompson claims that public writing clarifies thinking. Some forms of public writing are written in a way that helps further understand on specific topics or helps clarify what the writer is actually thinking. Thompson states that, “Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas…This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say,” (p. 51). Writing out what people are thinking onto paper helps them actually form out what they are trying to get across to others. He refers to the poet Cecil Day-Lewis as a form of evidence when she says, “I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have not incentive or need to write about it…We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand,” (p.51). This quotation by Day-Lewis supports Thompson’s claim about how writing out one’s thoughts helps to formulate what needs to be said because it shows that even well-known writers have a hard time trying to get their point across without writing it down first. This claim is relatively effective because others can easily relate; many people struggle with trying to develop what they are thinking, and writing things down makes things easier to formulate a point.