Having a position in writing means committing to a claim that can be disagreed with. This sounds straightforward, but in practice it is one of the things writers most consistently avoid. The pull towards balance, towards acknowledging all perspectives, towards presenting multiple views without taking one — this pull is powerful and, in certain writing contexts, appropriate. In essay writing, in personal writing, in any form of writing that is meant to say something rather than simply to survey what has been said, it is a form of evasion.
A writer without having a position in writing is one who has not yet decided what they think. The writing that results is not balanced — it is incomplete. Balance implies that equal weight has been given to competing views by a writer who has considered them. What most position-less writing actually offers is the impression of balance produced by the avoidance of commitment.
Why Writers Avoid Having a Position
The avoidance of position in writing is rarely deliberate. It tends to emerge from a specific kind of anxiety — the anxiety of being wrong, or of being challenged, or of alienating readers who hold different views. These are understandable concerns, and they are not entirely without basis. A writer who takes a position opens themselves to disagreement, and disagreement is uncomfortable.
But the alternative — writing that takes no position — is not safe. It is simply differently risky. A piece without a position risks being ignored, because there is nothing in it to engage with. A reader who disagrees with a position may argue; a reader who encounters no position simply moves on. The writer who avoids position in order to avoid challenge tends to produce writing that is unchallenged because it is unread.
There is also a subtler cost. A writer who consistently avoids position — who has learned to produce the appearance of thinking without the commitment that thinking requires — gradually loses the capacity for the commitment. The habit of hedging becomes the default, and the honest declaration of what one actually thinks becomes harder to access. Writing without position, practised long enough, produces a writer who genuinely does not know what they think.
What Having a Position Requires
Having a position in writing requires, first, knowing what you think. This is less obvious than it sounds. Many writers begin with a subject — something they want to write about — without having worked out a position on it. The subject is clear; the claim is not. Writing towards the subject without a claim tends to produce drafting that circles the subject without landing anywhere, because there is no destination to land at.
Finding the position often requires the kind of deliberate thinking that happens before drafting: the notes, the questions, the working through of what the evidence suggests and what the strongest objection to that suggestion is. A position that has not been tested against its own objections is not yet a position — it is an inclination. The difference matters because an inclination can be dislodged by the first counterargument a reader raises, while a position that has survived its own testing is harder to dislodge.
Having a position in writing also requires being willing to be wrong. Not carelessly — not taking a position without evidence or reasoning — but with the understanding that a position is a best current assessment rather than a certainty. The writer who holds a position with appropriate tentativeness — who can say this is what I think, given what I know, and I am open to revision given better evidence — is in a different position from the writer who has no position at all. The first is thinking honestly. The second is thinking loudly about the difficulty of thinking.
What a Position Is Not
A position is not an opinion in the dismissive sense — the merely personal view that makes no claim on the reader’s agreement. A position is a considered judgment about something that is true or important or worth attending to, arrived at through evidence and reasoning, and offered to the reader as a claim they can engage with rather than merely accept or ignore.
A position is also not certainty. A writer who holds their position as though it were beyond question — who writes with the closed confidence of someone who has not considered that they might be wrong — is not exercising the intellectual honesty that a genuine position requires. The position that acknowledges its own uncertainty is not weaker than the one that does not. It is more honest, and honesty is a form of strength in writing.
And a position is not contrarianism — the taking of an unusual view for the sake of distinction rather than because the evidence or reasoning supports it. The contrarian position is a performance of independence rather than an exercise of it. It is recognisable because it tends to be reached before the thinking is done rather than through it.
Having a position in writing is the beginning of saying something. It is what distinguishes a piece that exists from a piece that matters. The writer who commits to a position — who says, clearly and with reasons, what they think — is offering the reader something to engage with. The reader who disagrees has something to push against. The reader who agrees has their thinking confirmed and possibly sharpened.
Either outcome is better than the silence that a piece without a position produces.
