Writing is Thinking

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Socrates would have disagreed.

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

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

I'll just think it.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.