FREE ESSAY ON WRITING TECHNIQUE

WRITING TECHNIQUE

Chapter five, Writing as Healing and the Rhetorical Tradition: Sorting Out Plato,
Postmodernism, Writing Pedagogy, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder written by T.R.
Johnson of the University of New Orleans describes the different views of how language
helps a person who has encountered a traumatic experience overcome and heal. Chapter
nine, Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing written by Anne Hunsaker
Hawkins of Pennsylvania State University discusses how personal writing, such as
autobiographies and biographies, promote healing in regards to illness. Both of these two
chapters speak about writing in regards to healing, but chapter nine speaks about a
specific writing that tends to be more effective.
Classical logotherapists believed that disease and illness inflicted a person in order to
punish a person for something he/she had done. The illness was also viewed as a form of
trauma that deformed one's character by society of the classical era and healing of the
illness restored one's identity and moral purity. Healers used "verbal charms, prayers,
and incantations" in order to drive out the demon that caused the illness from the
infected person. Plato believed that healing occurred "in a plane of absolute, unchanging
truths above and beyond the plane of lived experience." In other words, Plato rejected
the idea of that language could heal the diseased or traumatized person.
Postmodern healers believe that healing occurs through "self-actualization" which occurs
through writing, another form of language. They feel that writing will provide an insight
to the individual and that insight will allow the healing process to begin.
It is said that pathography allows a person to heal because one consistently remembers
new details when one writes about a particular experience. The remembering of these
details are imperative to the healing process because it not only allows the person to
get through the experience by re-telling it also allows one to get beyond the traumatic
experience.
The healing process often occurs through writing an autobiography or biography because
the writer soon begins to feel that others should learn from his/her experience, which
bridges self-suffering and the outside world. Pathography demonstrates that healing
oneself often involves reaching out to others, which writing does. 
I believe that writing about a traumatic experience helps a person over come the feelings
that occur throughout the experience. I feel that this writing does not have to be purely
narrative, but can also be poetic, musical, or even dramatic. I began to heal from the
pain and suffering that my brother's death brought by writing poems, songs and short
narratives. Expressing myself through writing gave me the courage to talk to others about
it, which helped me heal as well as those who read and listened.