6.2: Understanding the Connection between the Personal and the Social

Some college writers see the writing that is done for classes as separate or different from one’s personal goals and interests. It can be easy to slip into the mindset that those personal activities, commitments, and convictions are off-topic or not relevant to class-work. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead of writing being driven either by individual identity or by outside criteria, both of these facets of identity are interwoven, and used in conjunction with one another, these influences act as the two wings that can help get a writing project off the ground. The sense of personal identity and having one’s own goals when writing (something
that waits to take flight) can play a significant role in a writer’s motivation and ability to write confidently. However, a text also needs to connect with the rest of the world in ways the audience can understand if it is to be effective.

That which makes us unique also connects us to others. Our DNA is our individual blueprint, and except for the case of identical twins or clones, each person has his or her own unique combination of genes. Yet, those genes come to us through a long heritage, stretching back countless generations, and have been passed down to us by our ancestors. Much like DNA, the social world of ideas and experiences we are born into both forms the basis of our individuality and deeply connects us to larger contexts in the world around us.

The individual and the collective are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they complement and reinforce one another. The inner world and the outer world are in constant flux, shaping, reinforcing, and challenging one another into new awareness. This matters in writing because it’s easy for people to think of writing as more one or the other—as being about personal expression, creativity, inspiration and communicating one’s ideas, or as being a task that is required by and for teachers, supervisors, or other audiences. Neither fully captures what writing is, and indeed, these two aspects can work together in many ways.

Trying to divide the personal from the social is ultimately a futile task because they overlap and influence one another so much, but as human beings, we have a tendency to think in terms of categories, porous as they may be. The categories are an illusion, but they can be helpful as a way to get started.

The Two Wings: An Exercise

While thinking about an idea and devising a way to write about it, you may find the following exercise helpful. We can call this exercise Taking Flight, or finding the two wings of your ideas. Since there is a personal as well as an inter-personal, or social, aspect to any idea, this is a way of mapping out those aspects of the idea.

1. Sketch out a blank diagram like the one I’ve drawn below.
2. Think about your interests, thoughts, activities, goals, and questions.
3. List the ideas that are mostly personal under one wing (leave the corresponding space under the opposite wing blank until step 5).
4. List the ideas that are connected to larger contexts, communities, or issues under the other wing.
5. Once you have your initial list, go back and fill in information relating to each idea under the opposite column, so that each idea now lists both a personal and a social component.

In Figure 1, I’ve outlined some key areas that will generally fall under each category. You might think of other key areas to include. Figure 2 shows an example of what your actual diagram might look like.

Figure 1. Diagram of Personal and Social Topical Aspects

This diagram can be used with either a list of interests you are using to try to find an idea, or it can be used to focus or develop an idea once you have a general direction.

Here is the diagram I made that lists several possible ideas:

Figure 2. Diagram of Personal Interests and Social Components.

Here, I listed a few of the ideas or causes that are personally important to me, and then tried to pair those with the issues in the outside world by asking questions that I could explore in the process of building an essay. For example, an issue that I have a strong personal and emotional response to is the killing of healthy and potentially adoptable
animals in shelters and animal control facilities. To link this to a context beyond myself, I listed the issue of kill versus no-kill shelters in the right-hand column, and in the left-hand column, I asked how the strategies used by no-kill shelters could also help other shelters to increase adoption rates and reduce euthanasia. I now have a question I
can research and write about.

Look for Unexpected Connections

Another way to build possibilities for writing is to look over your list of ideas and create connections between options that are not deliberately paired. For example, since I already had three potential ideas and their social aspects listed in the diagram, I didn’t put anything in the social column for the last few ideas I had in the personal column. One of these was “Favorite shows.” If I had gone into more detail, I might have listed the titles of some of my favorite television series, and then connected that to the social aspects I had listed for other items. In this case, one that would work would be “models or types of community. How does one build or encourage community?” I could write an essay that looks at how the relationships form and change over time between the characters in my favorite shows, and then even do some research into models of community building and community formation and see how well fiction mirrors what the relationship/community scholars have theorized.

Alternately, I could connect the subject of TV programs to the animal shelter idea. It’s unlikely I’d find a direct connection, but if I alter the idea of the animal shelter to something like how animals are portrayed on screen, I could also build on that idea, or even write about the different ways our society views or treats animals.

Remember that your diagram and your list of ideas are meant to be a jumping-off place, so you can change them as needed if you think of new ideas or find a new direction you want to explore.

The openness to creating connections where you may not expect to find them can be very useful. Cultivating creativity and connection building is a very healthy habit that can have unforeseen benefits for your writing.

Random Words

Here is a game you can use to help develop your creative flexibility. It’s one of my favorites.

1. Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half.
2. On one half write a list of random words, one per line.
3. Then, with the page still folded down the middle, give the paper to someone else, with your list facing down so the other person can’t see it.
4. On the other half of the paper, ask the other person to write a list of random words that he or she thinks of.
5. Then unfold the paper. You should have, on each line, a word you wrote and a word someone else wrote. These words will hopefully have nothing to do with one another.
6. And this is where the game begins: Try to find the connection between the two words on each line. Write a sentence that uses both of them in a logical and believable way.

This exercise can help to build your mental agility and help to make you more alert to forming connections that may not be immediately obvious to other people.

For example, I have picked a word, tree, and using a Facebook status update, asked one of my friends to give me a random word, which has turned out to be svelte. The sentence I created from these two words was, “The svelte tree waved its branchy arms like an ecstatic dancer.” I used the metaphor of the dancer to make it more of a challenge, but the sentence could have been simply, “The svelte tree waved its branches.”

Half of the game is the sense of anticipation before you know what word or words the other person will give you. It lightly mirrors the anxiety you may feel before you know what to write about. However, since, it’s also a game and the stakes are low, it begins to build an association between the anticipation of the unknown and your amusement
or enjoyment. The game usually turns out to not be as hard as one anticipates. An element of play can take the edge off of writing anxiety.

Another friend gave me the word bongo. I admit this was slightly harder, but I came up with, “As the tree stood drinking in the sun with its verdant leaves, it had no awareness that its life would soon change forever, and that it was destined to become the frame of a pair of bongo drums for young Sally.” I saw a connection between the tree and the word bongo because a bongo is a type of drum, and drum frames are usually made of wood. I’ve embellished my sentence just to play with the language, but “The wood from the tree was used to make bongo drums” would have also sufficed. Simple or complex, poetic or plain, no sentence that connects the two words is wrong. This is also fun to do with a group of people, where everyone can share what they came up with. It’s neat to see the sorts of things people can create out of this.

Build Ideas through Compound Topics

An important part of invention is the ability to make connections. One strategy that I find myself using is to think of my topics not as single ideas, but rather pairs of related ideas. It can be helpful to phrase your topic in such a way that it includes “and,” “or,” “but,” or other connecting words because that can shift your focus to the relationships
between parts of the subject. You are more likely to end up with a more specific focus or direction that way.

An example might be to take a broad subject such as the Internet and combine it with another subject, such as the workplace, to focus on the Internet in the workplace. Bringing the two subjects together makes me think of the following questions. How has the workplace changed as a result of the Internet? How has email changed the way a
company is run? What do employees or managers need to know about digital communications technologies? What problems might they encounter, and how can those be resolved or prevented? From there, I can keep asking questions until I find one I want to learn more about and eventually write about.

The advantage of focusing your essay around a compound idea is that it will tend to make the subject and focus of what you are writing about more complex. For example, if I make up a pair of subjects like “Animals and the Elderly,” “Doctor Who and identity,” or “work as spiritual growth,” I could then build on each of these ideas and try to think of what sorts of things might be in a resulting essay.