Writing ourselves: creating knowledge in a postmodern world

Abstract

In an attempt to encourage nurses and academics to write, there have been some recent journal papers that outline rules and guidelines for successful publication. This paper attempts to tackle the 'why' of writing rather than the 'how', and argues that writing is more than merely the representation of speech. Rather, writing is a creative act in which knowledge is produced as part of the process of writing itself, and at this level we might talk not merely of writing, but of writing. It is further argued that whereas the verb 'to write' always has an object (we write a book or an essay), the verb 'to write' is intransitive; it has no object. We do not write a paper, we merely write. We might, of course, choose to publish our writing, but it is done as an afterthought; we write for discovery, not for presentation. The act of writing is then compared to the act of teaching, and it is concluded that in order to teach, we must also write. Finally, this paper is offered as an example of writing (not an exemplar--there are as many ways to write as there are writers), and attempts to pull together material from a variety of sources including sociology, psychology, philosophy and literature as an act of discovery, of creating what I know about writing as I write.