What is writing?

What is writing? Is it simply putting pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard? Is it the act of drawing symbols to represent sounds that form words? Is it more? Or should it be less?
In our first meeting for our course “Writing Across the Curriculum”, our professor asked us to do a short write to answer this question.  Here is what I scrawled on my page: “Writing is putting thoughts and ideas to paper/screen using word craft to develop those ideas and thoughts.”

And now we are to write a short personal narrative about what we believe is important in writing in our content area.

My content area is History.  Here is what I know about writing in History, at least at the academic level: it tends to be verbose, it tends to be dreadfully academic, it will, very often, turn people away who believe they love history.  I love history but I don’t read history.  I read stories and not stories written by historians. I stopped reading stories written by historians the day walked across the stage and took home my Masters Degree in History.

Historical writing should be storytelling with meaning.  It should be pulling apart our stories in ways that we – laypeople, students, lovers of history – can find accessible. It should also be able to give us meaning in our stories and the stories of others without turning the lovers away. This is what is important in historical writing: telling a story and telling me why it matters in a way that I find inspirational, meaningful and engaging.

And that’s my story.