Clive Thomson's Rhetorical Analysis Of Public Thinking By Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson is a journalist, blogger and writer. He mainly focuses his writing on science and technology but this one chapter from his book Smarter than you think, “Public thinking,” has put a spin on writing and technology. Multiple times he talks about writing in many different forms. For example, he speaks of writing on blogs, on internet short stories (or fan fiction novels), in schools, in studies, and even on a regular basis. Thomson is trying to explain to his readers how writing, and the sharing of information across the internet, is beneficial to our society and ones well-being. In my readings of Thompson’s excerpt, I will examine Thomson’s examples and show how they are relevant and that it is beneficial.

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explain his argument of improving one’s self through writing by explaining to the readers about how writing clears thoughts. He states that other writers don’t write with a clear understanding of what they’re going to write. Quoting Cecil Day-Lewis, a poet, that he doesn’t “put into verse something that is already clear in my mind… We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”(51) After you start writing, your thoughts and understanding suddenly starts to become clearer on what you want to write. He makes his argument more persuasive by giving the readers an example of how William Butler Yeats’s poem was originally meant to be a political poem but instead Yeats got carried away and it “transformed into a spellbinding meditation on the terrifying feeling of being swept along in forces beyond your control.” (52) He mentions these writers and their experience of “unclear” writing in order to prove his argument that writing does clear ones understanding and thoughts.
Thompson also mentions the cognitive effect of improving ones memory just by writing it down. He reassures the readers of this fact by summarizing an experiment from 1978 about two psychologists tested people on seeing how well they can remember words. He states this experiment to prove to the reader that writing is actually very beneficial. This stating of an experiment gives Thompson more credibility to his readers.
Thompson, in short, just described how important the connectivity of the internet is. In a few paragraphs, he explained to his readers how that during pre-Internet times, it was much harder for people to connect; the discovery of penicillin would’ve been discovered decades earlier if Ernest Duchesne was connected more to the medical institution. Also “31 percent” of mathematicians “complained that they had needlessly duplicated work that a colleague was doing---because they weren’t aware it was going on.”(60) Thompson’s enthusiasm for this subject of matter helps him establish a connection to his reader to show the importance of the internet and writing. He connects completely to those who understand the true value of the internet and enlighten those who are unaware of its true potential. The way he writes his strong feeling towards it gives the paragraphs a conversational tone to his readers, as if a friend was explaining the marvelousness of the internet.
Clive Thompson gave many claims such as the effects of writing, the effects of an audience, and the effects of the internet. But as a whole, his essay is mainly focused on writing and its benefits.