When the topic of writing comes up in college and university classrooms, it is generally in the context of "how to do it" discussions. But another important question is "why we do it."

Catching Unicorns: How Writing Enables Our Imaginations provides a full answer to this second question with some important observations on the first.

Students spend a lot of time writing. They take lecture notes, they make notes while preparing to write an essay or report, they write to fellow students and professors, they record lab results, write exams and so on. They also spend a lot of time consuming the writing of others. They read textbooks, lecture notes, papers, essays, exams, assignment questions, emails, and texts. Furthermore, once students graduate, writing will be critical in their professional lives and in their roles as citizens. In view of the fact that we spend years learning how to read and write, the question "why we do it" is an important one.

Catching Unicorns focuses on how we use writing to think and ideate. I'll first argue that certain kinds of ideas are only discoverable with writing. The technology of writing enabled us to build the Saturn V rocket, to design mRNA vaccines, and to compose Adagio for Strings. Without it, these "ideas" would not exist. I'll present evidence that the collection of ideas spawned by writing has been growing exponentially for centuries and now forms the basis for our modern techno-literate societies. Second, I'll develop the idea that writing is a key technology which supports our collaboration, the signature talent of our species. Much of modern ideation is collaborative on a grand scale. It took 300,000 of us working for ten years to get Apollo 11 to the moon. Quite simply, the technology of writing enables a complex mind-sharing network to think and ideate over time and space. Both of these points are meant to convince students (and colleagues) that writing has been one of the most important technologies we've discovered.