In school, I think you're taught to write the body of a paper first and then go back and write the introduction and title. I could never do that. I needed to write the title first, and then the introduction, to frame my thoughts and prepare myself for writing the rest of the paper.
I just finished another chapter of my new favorite business book, Made to Stick. This chapter, focused on making your ideas concrete, sparked so many exciting thoughts that I just can't squeeze them into one blog post. So this will be one of a few posts on the topic of concreteness.
Jumping to another story. (Don't worry, they all tie together in the end.) In college, I took an educational psychology class on creativity (side note: how awesome is it that?). One thing that really intrigued me was the concept of fostering creativity through the use of constraints. My hypothesis was that, by imposing constraints in a creative situation, the result would actually be more creative.
The authors of Made to Stick conduct an experiment that, although it's meant to illustrate the concept of concreteness, it more specifically addresses the power of constraints.
Here's the experiment:
Step 1: Grab a pen and paper and spend 15 seconds doing the following: Write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of.
OK got it?
Step 2: Now, spend 15 seconds doing the following: Write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.
Remarkably, most people are able to list as many white things from their refrigerator as they can white "anythings". Which is pretty odd, right? Because the contents of our refrigerators are much fewer than the contents of the whole universe. The authors say that "concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain." I'd say that here concreteness is imposing constraints on your brain, and, yes, it helps you focus, and you're more able to think more creatively about something more focused.
So that's why I always start with the title first. This blog post is an example of just that. Coming up with the title first helps focus my thoughts and helps me write something more coherent (and hopefully interesting). Otherwise, with my attention span and tendency to get excited about lots of different things, I'm sure my blog posts would be absolutely all over the place (which in a lot of cases, especially "in the old days", they certainly are). Why is it that teachers teach us to write the title and introduction last, anyway?
Photo credit: churl
