The Best LEARNING Book in History - 40 Years AHEAD of its Time

this is a beautiful book it's totally transformed my approach to writing and to some extent learning and by the end of this video I hope to have persuaded you that it can do the same for you too I want you to see the book and I want to show you why I like it so much why I think it's so effective how it could transform your learning and also I'm going to tell you who William zinser was because he was a very interesting chap this is William ziner and for about 70 years he was a

professional writer WR he worked at the New York Herald Tribune he wrote for the New Yorker and he was editor of the Yale magazine but it was as a teacher that he really found his reach and Renown he taught a really popular and very highly regarded non-fiction writing course at Yale University and one of his books called onw writing well and you can guess what that was about has sold over one and a half million copies I have a copy and I'm going to share it with you later because now we're going to focus on

this is a book about why you should write how you should write and what will happen if you use writing as a tool to learn and I think the most important thing to say first is that it's not purely aimed at people who want to learn to write although it does work for that it's aimed at people that want to learn anything even maths or physics now I battled my way through a Physics degree and I would have scoffed at the idea of using writing as a way of learning say Maxwell's equations but I don't

anymore ziner says we can use writing to find out what we know and what we don't know are there holes in your knowledge or in your reasoning writing will expose them and by pure force of thought help you understand them but I have a problem and I don't know maybe you do too I hate writing it's painful for me squeezing thoughts out of my head and trying to put them on paper or fite them on a screen it's slow it's frustrating and it never really reads as well as I would have hoped but you can

take comfort from the knowledge that ziner didn't like like writing either I don't like to write but I take great pleasure in having written in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability like the solution to a mathematical problem perhaps in no other line of work is delayed gratification so delayed the book is divided into two parts the first part is ziner telling us why he's writing the book in the first place how he got the idea uh what he hopes to achieve and how he aims to do that writing is a tool

that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with acts and ideas it compels Us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly it forces us to keep asking am I saying what I want to say very often the answer is no and then part two is a curated collection put together by ziner of what he considers to be really good writing and he includes passages and then explains why that writing is so good and that's done in different disciplines so it's done for art music

science and maths but what does ziner have to say about part two all the writers represented in part two wrote clearly because the act of writing and rewriting made them think clearly organize their ideas told them what they knew and what they still needed to know and push them to new areas of knowledge it can do the same for you now I have seen criticisms of the book in other reviews that I've read where people say it's not a how-to guide and it doesn't give concrete examples on what you need to do but that is

really the intention and in fact on page 75 ziner himself says if it's also about writing to learn and it is I've left that mostly implicit not wanting to numb you with repetition of the same obvious Point what I find really interesting is that zin's intuition was really spoton he suggested that two types of writing are useful explanatory writing where you explain what you know and then exploratory writing which more sort of a free form writing where you write anything anything you like about a topic how it relates to you what you understand what you

don't understand how it relates to stuff that you already know about that subject and it turns out that what zinser is suggesting encompasses some of the best known learning techniques that have been discovered using scientific research and they are can I remember uh retrieval practice space practice elaborative interrogation interleaving now I promise to show you one of zin's other books so here it is just take a look at this if you want to learn to write or you want to improve your writing this book is an excellent choice it's packed full of wisdom and advice

this is what ziner has to say about ending a piece of writing when you're ready to stop stop if you've presented all the facts and made the point you want to make look for the nearest exit do you know how AI Works would you like to then I recommend you take a look at the large language model course from brilliant.org the sponsor of this video let me show you the course will give you a firm understanding of how llms work with interactive examples you'll find out what goes on beneath the surface when you use them

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