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The way people communicate verbally often reflects the way they think, which differs between people. Writing forces people to structure their thoughts more.

Also, efficient communication requires knowing what your audience already knows.

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The best way I have to describe the way I think is “spatially”, I can’t really say more than that except to say it’s different to “visually”. The problem is that the best way to explain something is basically do a topological sort of the DAG representing what needs to be explained, some people are uncannily good at this and appear able to do it in real-time. I… cannot.

My own way of thinking is both spatially and visually. I encode all my understanding into visual concepts (which may be very abstract), and link them to each other. That makes it difficult for me to do direct recall if I'm not given sufficient context. But makes it easy to connect things and do pattern matching. When I'm explaining, I found myself wandering down a particular path that I think the other person may not understand well, but can backtrack to the main conversation.

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