Against the Myth of the “Right” Writing Brain
I’ll start by admitting something mildly embarrassing: for a long time, I didn’t follow my own advice. I taught students about the either/or fallacy—how it flattens complexity, how it creates false binaries, how it pretends human behavior fits neatly into clean categories—and then promptly turned around and treated learning styles as if they were clean categories. I believed, at least implicitly, that students could be sorted: creative or rational, social or independent, concrete or abstract. I thought identifying the “type” would unlock the solution. What I eventually realized (and I mean really realized, through years of watching students write, stall, panic, revise, surprise themselves) is that this was nonsense. Not just inaccurate, but actively misleading. People don’t live, think, or write in neat boxes. Writing certainly doesn’t. The moment I let go of that colonial purity model—this idea that you are one thing and not another—my teaching got better, and so did my students’ writing.
That said, I still share these learning-style descriptions with students—but now I frame them very differently. Not as identities. Not as diagnoses. Not as labels you’re supposed to cling to. Instead, I offer them as tendencies you may recognize in yourself at different moments, on different days, in different writing situations. Because the obsession with correctness, purity, and rigid labeling is deeply problematic in writing studies. Everyone writes differently. Everyone thinks differently. And most importantly: everyone writes differently depending on the task, the stakes, the audience, the deadline, and their own emotional state. That variability isn’t a flaw—it’s the baseline condition of human writing.
So here’s how I ask you to use these categories now—not as boxes, but as tools for self-awareness.
If you tend to be a creative or verbal learner, you may generate ideas easily but struggle with organization. That doesn’t mean you’re “bad at structure.” It means structure is a separate skill you need to practice deliberately, not a personal failure.
If you lean toward being an independent learner, you probably need time to sit with ideas before they click. That’s fine—but only if you actually make that time. Independence without time management turns into last-minute panic, not deep thinking.
If you’re a pragmatic or rational learner, you may love rules, outlines, and systems—and then get so deep in them that you lose the larger purpose of the argument. Organization should serve meaning, not replace it.
If you’re a social learner, you need to talk ideas out loud. This is not a weakness; it’s an intellectual strength. And even if this isn’t your natural style, learning to work this way will help you enormously—in this class and beyond—because writing is never as solitary as we pretend it is.
If you’re a spatial learner, you may think best through diagrams, circles, color-coding, or visual mapping. That’s excellent—just remember that academic audiences need to see that thinking translated into sentences and paragraphs. Visual thinking still has to become readable writing.
If you’re a concrete learner, you may focus heavily on sources, details, and evidence, sometimes at the expense of thesis statements, topic sentences, and transitions. Evidence does not argue by itself. You have to guide your reader through it.
If you’re an emotional or sensitive learner, you may worry about tone, conflict, or offending someone. Clarity is not cruelty. Academic writing values directness, not hedging yourself into invisibility.
If you’re an abstract learner, you may live comfortably in big ideas but avoid specificity. This is incredibly common—and exactly what this course is designed to help you work through. Arguments live or die in the details.
And now the most important part: none of these are exclusive. You are not “one of these.” You move between them constantly. You might be abstract at the start of a paper, concrete in the research phase, social when revising, and independent when drafting. You might be pragmatic under pressure and creative when relaxed. That flexibility is not inconsistency—it’s literacy.
So the goal here is not to find your “true” writing type. That kind of thinking is just another false binary dressed up as self-knowledge. The real goal is to notice your habits, recognize your patterns, and learn how to work with them rather than against yourself. Writing isn’t about purity or correctness. It’s about adaptation, awareness, and practice. And the more you understand how you move through these modes, the more control you gain over your writing—no labels required.