I was introduced to writing math at a very late stage of my education. Somehow math meant solving bunch of problems, understanding theorems / proving theorems or translating math problems in to an algorithm that could be solved numerically on a computer. What has “Writing”, as in writing in plain English got to do with learning mathematics ?

My first brush towards this activity happened accidentally while I was teaching as an adjunct. One of the senior lecturers was preparing an assignment for the class with no problems/no equations to solve / nothing to calculate. I was curious about the assignment and asked her , the reason for giving such an assignment. That’s when I learnt that there is a ton of stuff that can be learnt about math, by writing about math in one’s own words. What are the kinds of writing that can be done ?

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I was referred to a book by Joan Countryman , titled “Writing to learn mathematics”. The author says that there are 6 types of writing that one can use to teach math

  1. Freewrites;

  2. Biography and autobiography;Mathography;

  3. Learning blogs,logs and Journals;

  4. Summaries;

  5. Word problems;

  6. Formal writing

Though I could never implement any of the above in my teaching, the points are immensely useful while learning new stuff in math. Even if one implements a couple of the above tools , I guess the learning ability would vastly improve.