When you think something, what precisely are you doing? Does the thought take shape in your head, or does it only coalesce as it’s put in a communicable form? About once a year, I go down a little rabbit hole of curiosity regarding language, communication, and the meaning of thought. Here I go again.
This year’s rabbit hole is writing-shaped.1The results of the act of writing are wide-ranging. However, I’m mostly considering the expository writing that I typically use for this blog.. I’m considering whether thinking, the internal process of bouncing between and generating ideas, is meaningful if we can’t communicate its results.
My intuition is certainly not. Just like you get no points in trivia for having an answer on the tip of your tongue, a thought is nothing until it can be transferred to someone else. If it is transferred poorly, it’s likely that the thought is not as clear in your own mind as you believe it to be.2There’s a lot to be said about the medium of communication. Some people send and receive thoughts better through different formats. But I believe the point stands: an unclear thought is reflected by unclear communication. Yet the value of writing is not limited to its ability to transfer an idea to someone else.
The act of communicating an idea has a refining effect: if you are unhappy with how the thought is written or spoken, there’s often an intuitive feeling that the idea isn’t quite right. Many years ago I realized the utility of making a statement for the sake of testing how it feels to say it.3This is not the same as already having an opinion and tentatively sharing it to test how it will be received. I’ve said many things out loud that felt wrong, and that allowed me to adjust my position and refine how I speak about a topic.
This effect is subtly different while writing. I find it faster, but less potent. Without the pressure of talking to someone else—even if I implicitly trust them, there’s always some level of tension while embarking on a train of thought that you haven’t yet explored—writing down an idea in a safe text editing window feels more muted. But I can write quickly and don’t need to worry about another person’s time while doing so, allowing me to try out many different ideas at a rapid pace.
I also find that writing helps me generate new ideas. It is an action that taps into my stream of thoughts in unexpected ways, and I will often find myself unintentionally writing a new or augmented thought that lights me up like a bulb. For example, the previous paragraph’s core idea of comparing speaking and writing came to me while I was writing what I thought would be the concluding paragraph of this post. Furthermore, my next point also only occurred to me in the act of writing this post.
Despite acknowledging how writing can be used to rapidly refine and create new ideas, I almost never intentionally act on that idea. Writing has been a reflex for most of my life. I journal to get my thoughts out; I write because I have a fun idea or story that I want to share. I’ve never considered writing to its full extent as a mechanism to create, refine, and share ideas. The intuition for that concept has existed, but up until now I have not claimed it.
Realizing the importance of writing in my life, I want to treat it with care and respect. I often neglect to hone in on my ideas while writing a draft and subsequently editing it, focusing too much on mechanics or word choice that sound nice as opposed to saying what I mean. Part of this is a result of my education. Writing lessons focused on themes, basic plot structure, idioms and metaphors and symbols, all these wonderful tools that can make a piece of writing sing. We never spent time, to my recollection, making sure the resulting song reflected the idea we wanted to communicate.4I believe in a connection between “beautiful” writing and its ability to communicate, but ignoring the communication part is done at my own peril.
Text is a tough medium. These posts are not a conversation. Insofar as you trust me not to edit them afterward, they are a static bit of data that I have committed to put on my blog, implying that I vouch for the thoughts therein. But if those thoughts are poorly communicated, you and I are stuck with the representation I chose to post here along with any subsequent confusion that my lack of clarity caused. To that end I want to take more care when writing posts and expand my writing toolset so I can say what I mean in an appropriate format. I want to be unafraid to let the words fly as a way to access my thoughts, then take the time to properly edit a post so that it’s not just (mostly) void of typos, but also reflects the thought itself.
Take a moment to consider how you access your thoughts. What external process is most closely tethered to your brain? How often do you use it to your advantage? While I strongly believe that the broad family of written media is the best and most universal way to communicate ideas,5Sorry, modern art. what’s important is that you have a way to properly consider a thought and share it with someone else. Without that, we are all working at cross-purposes and won’t take any steps forward. Worse yet, you won’t know what’s going on in your own head.
- 1The results of the act of writing are wide-ranging. However, I’m mostly considering the expository writing that I typically use for this blog.
- 2There’s a lot to be said about the medium of communication. Some people send and receive thoughts better through different formats. But I believe the point stands: an unclear thought is reflected by unclear communication.
- 3This is not the same as already having an opinion and tentatively sharing it to test how it will be received.
- 4I believe in a connection between “beautiful” writing and its ability to communicate, but ignoring the communication part is done at my own peril.
- 5Sorry, modern art.