Love, Writing and Basketball

The activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text is writing. Now that would be a great definition for a research paper on the evolution of writing for the past millennium, but it would definitely not make for a great start to say… this post. So your writing should vary depending on what you’re trying to convey.

Now let’s look at writing in the field of science and technology. I see great similarities between this type of writing and basketball. Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, once said that basketball is about loving the game first, and then learning how to play later. Michael started playing basketball at a very young age in his backyard, and developed a love for the game before he actually focused his interest to learn more about the fundamentals and the organized way to play. I’ve followed the same path, and although obviously not as successful…yet, I believe that the same principle can be carried over to other fields such as science or literature; once you begin to enjoy what you experience, you will tend to dedicate more time to it and begin to understand it in a more thorough manner.

Coming back to science and technology, you have to first start liking the field or develop an interest before you can understand the nooks and crannies of the field. In order to do this, there must be multiple ways to communicate science and technology to people. The first is a less technical approach which attempts to gain the interest of the readers, take for example Bill Bryson’s, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” which gives the reader a very friendly introduction to science. This kind of writing must appeal to the masses and attract as many readers as possible, so generally you’d find a slightly informal or comic tone in them. If this first step is successful in creating an interest in the reader, then the readers themselves will seek out other books in the field which will eventually lead them to technical scientific writing, or in other words, research papers, our second way of writing in science and technology. Both types of writing are essential to the field because without the first type, less people would be motivated to follow the path of the scientist or reach a level at which they can understand the more technical research papers.

The first type of writing relates to Michael Jordan’s backyard court while the research papers relate to his high school basketball program with a coach to give specific instructions on how to play. Without the backyard court, who knows where Michael would have gone… baseball? We all know how successful he would have been there.