Learning to Write & Speak

I like to set goals for myself and every once in awhile I try to ask myself these questions, "how can I be a better artist and how can I be a better person." Well, I'm not much of a writer or a speaker, but I really want to be able to write and speak more critically and professionally in my field. Today both Marty and Jamie made it a point for me to look at other designers work, and I do. However, I think what I'm not doing is taking the time to really analyze, understand and relate the artwork to my own practice. So because repetition can create mastery, I'm creating a goal for myself. Every Friday, I need to find a piece of design and some sort of literature about art or design to analyze and write about. There's a couple things I'm hoping will happen when I do this:

1. By analyzing other artwork, my own work will become stronger by seeing how other artists handle similar ideas and principles

2. By writing about other artwork, I hope to improve my writing abilities and develop a language for speaking

3. By reading literature by other writers and artists, I can learn how to comprehend the language used in professional practice as well as understand how they use it

At my previous college my English composition professor used to stress the importance of writing ideas out because it's the physical act of writing something down that creates the reality. It's one thing to have a goal in mind, but if you take the time to write it down then you're already one step closer to that goal. I think this is really important for visual artists because we take ideas from our minds and visually represent them. In the design department we already do this in multiple ways if you think about it, we write in our blogs, we sketch out ideas, we keep process binders.