WRITING OURSELVES - CREATING KNOWLEDGE IN A POSTMODERN WORLD

In an attempt to encourage nurses and academics to write, there have b een some recent journal papers that outline rules and guidelines for s uccessful publication, This paper attepts to tackle the 'why' of writi ng rather than the 'how', and argues that writing is more than merely the representation of speech, Rather, writing is a creative act in whi ch knowledge is produced as part of the process of writing itself, and at this level we might talk not merely of writing, but of writing, It is further argued that whereas the verb 'to write' always has an obje ct (we write a book or an essay), the verb 'to write' is intransitive; it has no object, We do not write a paper, we merely write, We might, of course, choose to publish our writing, but it is done as an aftert hought; we write for discovery, not for presentation, The act of writi ng is then compared to the act of teaching, and it is concluded that i n order to teach, we must also write, Finally, this paper is offered a s an example of writing (not an exemplar - there are as many ways to w rite as there are writers), and attempts to pull together material fro m a variety of sources including sociology, psychology, philosophy and literature as an act of discovery, of creating what I know about writ ing as I write.