Socratic Scribbling

Entertaining, enlightening and edifying. Malachy Walsh synthesizes the lessons he learned from his schooling with the nuns and Jesuits, his career in marketing and his life long appreciation of the Great Books in order to provide a truly accessible roadmap for writing, and writing well.

The last chapter outlines the lessons, rules and ideas that Walsh explains and expands upon in the rest of the book. This outline is an amazing reference resource that will keep Walsh's book near my desk at all times.

The reason this book was so enjoyable, though, was Walsh's ability to make great writers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Shakespeare eminently accessible, pulling the curtain back on their proclivity for literary pilfering, while blending his hilarious insights and experiences from the ad making world.

As a parent, there is much that Walsh recovers that I want to make a part of my children's education. I have a few years to try and catch up myself! But Walsh provides the tools and points to additional resources that I'm excited to explore.

Aristotle and the Art of Ad Writing

Socratic Scribbling by Malachy Walsh

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Malachy Walsh is the genius who revitalized Cheese Whiz. He made a career in advertising by applying the principles of Aristotle's Poetics to advertising. Afterwards, he got involved in moderating groups reading the Great Books in the Online Great Books program, which is where I got this book.

This book is great because it integrates the time tested principles of Aristotelianism into the subject of writing. There are a lot of books on writing on the market, but this book breaks down the writing process with an eye to the teachings of Aristotle on invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Walsh illustrates these concepts with stories from his experience with advertising, which are often humorous and invariably insightful.

As an illustration of Walsh's principles, he suggests that writing involves having a “news” sense, which involves something “new,” which, in turn, involves asking the question of what would interest a reader or catch the reader's attention. As a guide to thinking about that issue, Walsh suggests applying Aristotle's categories - substance, quantity, quality, relative relations, locations, time, position, states of being, activities, and effects. These are the way we think about things, and if we are going to find something new and noteworthy, they are going to be found in the categories.

There may be a thousand ways to write, but it is important to have some practical approach to get started and push through to the finish. Aristotle's approach is one that works, in life as well as writing.