PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, a gubernatorial press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor, Vic Atiyeh, and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

If you knew my bias, you could imagine my joy when I came across this quote in Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s latest book, “The Time of Our Lives.”

“To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.”

Noonan attributed the quote to historian David McCullough.

She agrees with it.

So do I.

In my career in government and the private sector, whenever I was in the business of hiring for a vacancy, I focused on whether the candidate had the ability to write. That mattered because, to me, the ability to write indicated something about the candidate’s ability to think.

I often resorted to a writing test at the time of the interview, giving the candidate an assignment on the fly rather than relying on a writing scrapbook.

The question was not whether a candidate could write in my style. The question was whether the candidate could write quickly and, to go back to the quote above, write well as an evidence of the ability to think well.

Noonan goes on in another section of her book to describe the craft of writing.

“I want to take a minute to talk about my view on writing. To me, it is a full body exercise. What you write comes from your brain, heart, spirit, soul and psyche, you hold nothing back, all parts are engaged. When you’re writing you give the creative part of your brain full sway, you let it dominate, you don’t let your critical side mug it or slow it down. Later, in editing, you bring your critical self to the fore, question the assertion, kill the aside. But the point is to give your writing everything you have at the moment you’re doing it and rethink when the page has cooled.”

Good words. Writing requires concentration. It requires putting your whole self into the exercise. It requires focus.

Then, when a first draft is done, it requires editing with a constructively critical eye.

For Noonan, as she compiled her book, which is a collection of what she believes are her best columns over the years, it also required an ability to put past work in context. As she re-read the pieces she had written, she realized she might have struck the wrong tone and, if given a chance for a mulligan (pardon the golf reference), would write differently.

But, that, too, is a product of writing – the ability to look at past work and to improve and learn.

So, here’s to writing well and thinking well.