
Writing is Thinking - pmichaud
http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/the-secret-about-writing-that-no-one-has-the-balls-to-tell-you/
======
grellas
While "writing is thinking" clearly overstates the case, there is no question
that writing about a topic is a form of discipline that helps us to think more
deeply about it.

Writing is a lot like exercise. It has salutary benefits over time for anyone
who consistently undertakes it. Much of life is habit. If we sit about
passively absorbing all that we think we know, we will suffer from a surfeit
of derivative knowledge that perhaps deludes us into thinking we know more
than we really do. In a way, we then "know" things but we really don't
understand them. Writing - and particularly the habit of writing regularly -
forces us to think about things and, as we think more deeply about a thing, we
tend to make it our own - and thus our second-hand thoughts are replaced more
and more by original thinking of our own. This original thinking may or may
not be useful to those about us. This depends on the quality of what we have
to say. But it will be _our_ thinking and that is no small thing.

This assumes too that we strive for originality in expressing ourselves in
writing. All too much of academic writing is passive-voice-ridden "it is
asserted" and "it is believed" type of writing, stuffed with scholarly
citations, and utterly unreadable and useless. In law school, I did a
scholarly piece for law review that was like that. It actually got published.
There was not an original thought in it. But even that was not a useless
exercise. Once I saw the limitations of that sort of derivative writing, I was
able to get beyond it and what a liberating feeling it is to just get to a
point where you can express your own thoughts as you develop them instead of
merely mimicking others. Writing well and often will help many people get to
this point. I think this is the main point the author is making.

In this sense, this piece is highly encouraging to writers and should be taken
in that spirit. The author says, in effect, it is hard work but by all means
write and write often - the benefits are great and it is all there for anyone
to learn if he only applies himself. I commend this spirit and wish I had
those about me in my day to encourage me in this fashion.

That said, not everyone can be a good writer because there is an innate
intelligence of some kind upon which good writing must be predicated and not
all people have this. At the same time, as others have noted, all kinds of
people can think who do not necessarily write, and it is a mistake to say or
imply that the two are invariably correlated.

~~~
reader5000
>That said, not everyone can be a good writer because there is an innate
intelligence of some kind upon which good writing must be predicated and not
all people have this.

If you are writing correctly you are exercising cognitive skills, and I think
can actually improve them. It has already been shown physical exercise is
positively correlated with iq. I don't think anybody has done the study but I
imagine a similar correlation would hold for intellectual exercise, writing
being a main example.

~~~
grellas
I think we agree on the basic point but my added qualifier really arises from
my experience as a lawyer, where I have seen quite a few people over the years
who never quite attain the ability to write really _well_ because of
intellectual limitations, though they can write at some level and though
writing no doubts helps them develop the cognitive abilities they do have.

------
dejb
I suspect the author of this piece is generalising from one example

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/>

The author probably does not possess the mental traits required to formulate
big ideas without the need to write them down but I'm sure there are those
that do. Of course writing ideas down is probably a useful technique for
everyone and it is almost a necessity if you want anybody else to act on those
ideas.

------
raganwald
The post's big idea resonates with me and with HN's core values. While we
think all the time, and we think we have big thoughts. But a thought that is
unexpressed is equivalent to a business idea. "Hey, let's deliver packages
overnight!"

The value is in working out the details, in logically organizing things.
Writing an actual business plan is _hard_ , in most part because it forces you
to think things through, to stop hand-waving. That's the big leap, from
"business idea" to "business plan." In writing? In presentation form? As a
speech? Doesn't matter, the key is going from an idea to something that you
share with someone else.

Sure, we can argue that speaking aloud for an audience has the same effect, as
does writing a program or composing music. I'd argue that painting does as
well. But the core idea here is that organizing thoughts such that they can be
communicated to another human being is thinking on an entirely different scale
of magnitude.

------
michael_nielsen
Albert Einstein was asked by the mathematician Jacques Hadamard what role
words played in his thinking. His reply said, in part:

"The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any
role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as
elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can
be `voluntarily' reproduced and combined."

It's from Hadamard's book "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field". The full letter is extremely interesting, containing several remarks
on Einstein's self-perception of how he thought. Unfortunately, I don't
immediately see it online, and I don't have immediate access to my hard copy
of the book.

------
zaidf
You have to think to write. But you don't _have_ to write to think.

~~~
pmichaud
It's funny, I was going to point out in the essay that I think the exact
opposite of what you said above: You have to write to think, but just because
you write, doesn't mean you've had big thoughts. It's necessary, but not
sufficient.

~~~
scott_s
Programmers can code to think. Illustrators can draw to think. Musicians can
play to think.

One can think without writing, coding, drawing or playing. But putting your
thoughts into form makes a huge difference because it lets one _build_.

~~~
pmichaud
Yeah, I agree with you. I didn't get into it in the article because I was
trying to be succinct, but you're right.

~~~
tsally
_Yeah, I agree with you. I didn't get into it in the article because I was
trying to be succinct, but you're right._

It's a solid piece and it's important to be succinct, but I think in this case
your succinctness might cause some readers to miss your main point. You might
consider replacing "writing" with "the act of creation".

~~~
electromagnetic
Agreed and I'd wholly agree with the general point of "if you don't create,
you don't think".

Humans by nature are data processing machines, our entire life is just data.
We remember images because we have saved a biological jpeg in our brain, we
remember words and sentences because we've got text and audio biologically
saved. However it's the act of _creating_ that distinguishes thought from
action.

When I write, or draw, or create a song I am creating something _new_. I'm
creating data that has in essence never existed before. It's not a hard coded
biological function and it's not something everybody does.

The act of creating shows our distinction as individuals, and perhaps prove to
ourselves and others that we're not just p-zombies faking our way through
life.

------
xtho
"If you’ve never written anything thoughtful, then you’ve never had any
difficult, important, or interesting thoughts."

Socrates would have disagreed.

~~~
notaddicted
Great point. Some people see the flaws in their argument when they write it.
For others, dialogue serves the same purpose. You still have to state you
ideas in an understandable way, so that they stand up on their own. And there
are more than 2 ways.

------
mad44
I think this quote sums things up "Writing is nature's way of telling us how
lousy our thinking is" Leslie Lamport

Lamport is a renowned distributed systems researcher, inventor of Paxos, and
creator of LaTeX.

~~~
mad44
Writing is difficult for two reasons: (i) writing requires thought and
thinking is difficult, and (ii) the physical act of putting thoughts into
words is difficult. There’s not much you can do about (i), but there’s a
straightforward solution to (ii) — namely, writing. The more you write, the
easier the physical process becomes. I recommend that you start practicing
with email. Instead of just dashing off an email, write it. Make sure that it
expresses exactly what you mean to say, in a way that the reader will be sure
to understand it.

[http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-
lesl...](http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-leslie-
lamport/)

~~~
mad44
Bonus quote from Lamport, and I will stop, I promise. (Although I can give
several similar quotes from Dijkstra also.)

Math is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your writing is;
mathematical rigor has proved a solid foundation for other engineering
disciplines — why not ours?

------
awolf
> people who don’t write, are people who don’t think.

Pfft... In protest, I won't even bother to write a retort to this
unsubstantiated claim.

I'll just think it.

~~~
silkodyssey
I think the assertion has some merit in as far as writing allows us to
communicate our thoughts with a higher level of precision.

It's relatively easy to have a vague idea about something but it's a different
matter to explain it with well reasoned arguments.

With programming it is the same. It is sometimes easy to conceptualize the
steps required to solve a particular problem or implement a particular
algorithm but when the time comes to translate it to program code it can be
more difficult as we have to think about all the little details.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Which is why I discuss them with my close friend who is a hard intellectual
opponent. No writing required.

------
Ixiaus
He is falsely equating writing with thinking. Writing is a manifestation of
thought, just as other forms of expression are.

His claims and logic come across as supercilious, too.

Language is just a standard for communication amongst group. Thought,
thinking, etc., is an individual process one in which we use language to
convert thought into terms that can be understood. The diffusion of ideas,
thought, etc., by way of language in writing, reading, speaking, hearing can
_stimulate_ thought and even introduce new _forms_ of thought. But language
will never be thought.

If his claims are true, then he is casting out gifted individuals in music,
dance, sculpture, and other art forms; people that love dancing but may never
write an article on the philosophical implications of their art form in their
entire life! These are and are not intelligent, thoughtful, original, and
interesting people!

------
shalmanese
I don't know about the author but as far as "big thoughts" go, I can
frequently wrestle with ideas in my head that take about 20 minutes of
description end-to-end without much of a sweat. Long periods of doing pure
thinking in my head has trained my memory to such an extent that this is
routine.

Personally, I find I can get only the smallest and simplest of my ideas down
on paper. The language inside my head is far more interactive & descriptive
than mere words as it includes animations, diagrams, forces, visualizations,
abstract mappings & deliberate ambiguities.

I try and avoid writing down stuff for as long as possible as what often
happens with my big thoughts is a type of shift where the basic premise
remains the same but the method for thinking about the problem changes.
Writing makes this process less fluid.

------
F_J_H
Along the same lines, I had a professor who once said that you "can't have
thoughts for that which you do not have words for". This refers more to
vocabulary than writing, but I feel that there is some truth to it.

Although the author may overstate his case a little, I do think that the
discipline of writing does force a person to learn how to articulate thoughts
in a clear manner, which is always a good thing.

~~~
metajack
An old English teacher of mine tried to convince us that you couldn't be bored
if you didn't know the word "bored". You certainly can.

There are no words for the feelings many people have. We have a whole system
of literature for this, which we call poetry.

~~~
gnaritas
Boredom isn't a thought, it's a feeling. As for having thoughts you don't have
words for, people do it all the time, and you just make up a new word for it,
it's how language evolved.

------
xsmasher
Ben Jonson agrees with you: >"Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune,
whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is
preposterous;"

On a similar note, programming is not typing, it's thinking.

------
baran
I first came to the realization that writing is thinking after trying to put
my startup idea down in words, especially in a YC application format.

------
mattraibert
Provocative article. Really solid advice to write 1000 words about a belief.
Too bad he starts with such a sexist preamble.

------
Arun2009
Haven't you ever had wordless thoughts?

I often find that wordless thoughts are much more efficient to work with
mentally than wordy ones. When you need to communicate, or the thought is
intricate or important enough to require a deliberate fleshing out, THEN you
write.

Here's an example of a wordless thought: you see a figure that is almost
symmetrical and you consider why it isn't exactly symmetrical. It's possible
to do this consideration without wording your thought - the reason for
asymmetry exists in a wordless form in your mind.

Here's another: you're sitting and you suddenly want to pee. You just get up,
go to the bathroom, and pee. The idea of peeing is definitely in your mind
when you go to the bathroom - it's rarely explicitly worded out.

Yet another: when you're doing minor re-factoring to your code, much of your
thoughts are actually wordless.

I'll appropriate a term from psychology for the process of converting wordless
thoughts to wordy ones: focusing (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing>).
Wordless thoughts are basically purely experiential in nature. Wordy ones are
deliberate, analytical, and well, wordy. Focusing is the process of converting
the former to the latter. You hold the wordless thought in your mind's eye and
deliberately covert it into a verbal form.

I am of the opinion that much of philosophy is simply converting wordless
thoughts to wordy ones - just as artists are experts in drawing what they see,
philosophers are experts in focusing.

My yet another hunch is that experts often think wordlessly about matters
their field. It's just too inefficient to word out every thought process.

