Rhetorical Analysis Op-ed

7/27/2019 Rhetorical Analysis Op-ed

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September 16, 2013, 9:13pm

Time to Write? Go Outside

By CAROL KAUFMANN

Fall promises crisp days with ample sunlight, a lifting of the humidity and ideal temperatures for

being outdoors. This also means my writing will be getting better.

Nothing coaxes jumbled thoughts into coherent sentences like sitting under a shade tree on a

pleasant day. With a slight breeze blowing, birds chirping melodies, wee bugs scurrying around

me and a fully charged laptop or yellow legal pad at hand, I know Ill produce my best work.

I stumbled upon my ideal writing conditions quite by accident. When a particularly troublesome

set of captions for a National Geographic story I was working on was causing me conniptions

that yellow-bordered magazine takes those captions pretty seriouslyI charged out of thehouse and down to the Potomac River, with notes, photograph photocopies and pen in hand. I

planted myself at a picnic table, stared at the water and let my brain go all mushy. I relaxed my

eyes, focusing on nothing.

Writing became easier. Words that were locked in the brain vault appeared. I saw the bigger

picture, the story waiting to be told.

Turns out, there are perfectly good reasons why writing outdoors works for me, and most likelyevery other writer on the planet.

Back in the 1970s, two pioneering environmental psychologists, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan,

began investigating natures healing effect on the mind. Decades later, their studies concluded

that connections with nature could help us shirk mental fatigue, restore drifting attention and

sharpen thinking. Even in an urban environment, a little green stimulates our senses, they report.

Nature immersion also helps us feel alive. Another series of studies published in the Journal of

Environmental Psychology in 2010 concluded that being in nature made people feel energetic

and less lethargic, all essential ingredients for writing stories that exude telling details and

narrative tension. After all, you just cant tell a good story when half asleep.

Nor can you do so when surrounded by the beeps and dings and hums of any number of devices.

The author and journalist Richard Louv has thought a lot about technological distractions. Mr.
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Louv has long studied and proclaimed the benefits that humans can reap from being in nature.

His wildly popular Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit

Disorder includes evidence that exposure to nature is essential not just to childrens mental and

physical health, but to everyones. Adults are just as susceptible to a Vitamin N deficiency he

explains in his more recent The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age. I

asked him about my writing-outside theory.

Its likely you find it easier to write outside not only because of natures direct impact, but

because of the absence of so many distractions, most of them technological. says Mr. Louv,

who also finds his writing better when he does it by a lake or in the woods. The info-blitzkrieg

has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition: continuous

partial attention. Constant electronic intrusions, he says, leave anyone trying to work frustrated,stressed and certainly less creative.

Amen. And though this seems like an obvious conclusion, how often are we writers victims of

indoor inertia? Why do we try to write while held hostage by cookie-cutter offices, zapped by

overhead fluorescence and pinged by electronic apps of varying degrees of annoyance? This,

truly, is writing with only a partial mind, because our mind lies in too many different realms.

Im guilty. After the kids are at school, I often dont move from my laptop spot at the old pine

dining table, tapping away. With breakfast dishes and homework Xeroxes still cluttering the

space, the various electronics peeping alerts, Im often working for a solid half hour before I

realize Im not focused not really.

Trouble is, says Mr. Louv, its getting harder to find places beyond electrotrusion (using an

apt term he just coined).

I know one answer. I found that my dream office is in the middle of a savanna, a place far from

any WiFi or even an electrical outlet. While bumping along a dirt road in southern Kenya, where

I was doing research for my recent book Safari, I madly scribbled thoughts and impressions on

a sturdy notebook I could hold in one hand. Writing while jostling and swatting tse-tse flies

doesnt seem ideal for recording quotes from guides and notes on cheetahs, but, really, it was.

My attention drifted over the blowing grasses, the seemingly endless undulating landscape, and


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homed in on the story in front of me. Some of the very messy phrases that were difficult to

physically write down, but otherwise easy to conjure, survived several self-critical revisions, my

editors hand and copy editing. Bad handwriting can always be transcribed; jumbled thoughts are

a devil to untwist.

Most people think of the mind as being located in the head, writes Diane Ackerman in A

Natural History of the Senses, but the latest findings in physiology suggest thatthe

minddoesnt really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and

enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell,

hearing, vision. There was no substitute for being immersed in nature in my case, in the

home turf of elephants, lions and crocodilesand hearing, smelling, feeling and sometimes

tasting what was in their environment.

Im writing a book on oceans now. The research process, performed indoors amid humming

gadgetsand sandwiched between other prioritiesis difficult. But soon, Ill head outdoors,

look at life in the sea and plant myself in front of the water to do the writing.

I know I cant always go to the ocean or to an African savanna to write. In fact, those kinds of

opportunities are few and far between. But I can take the lessons I learned there with me, and

every day, remind myself to take five small steps away from that old pine table to the back patio.

Its a tiny space, but one enveloped by branches from neighboring trees and surrounded by an

overzealous wisteria vine. The words come then, not perfectly the first time of course, but in

time they do feel safe marching forward.

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Rhetorical Analysis Op-ed