At the clinic where I work, one of the things we teach students of all ages and levels, adults and university students included, is how to write effectively.

At tonight’s in-house professional development workshop for our teachers, the presenters opened with this quotation, with which some of you may be familiar:

… all our experience of life: the actual substance of it, the material facts of it, embed themselves in us quite a long way from the world of words. It is when we set out to find words for some seemingly quite simple experience that we begin to realize what a  huge gap there is between our understanding of what happens around us and inside us, and the words we have at our command to say something about it.

Words are tools, learned late and laboriously and easily forgotten, with which we try to give some part of our experience a more or less permanent shape outside ourselves. They are unnatural, in a way, and far from being ideal for the job.

Source:

Hughes, Ted. “Words and Experience” in ESSAYS Thought and Style by Brian Kellow and John Krisak.

Ted Hughes is an English poet, playwright, editor, and writer.

This, I believe, encapsulates why writing is hard, and why the work of writers should not be diminished or devalued.