The value of writing

December 29, 2020 15 minute read

Considerations on how practicing writing can help improving how we communicate and how we think

Time is possibly your most valuable resource. A full-time job, the joy of spending time with family and friends, and few hobbies may make it really hard to find time to squeeze in anything else. Why would you even bother to use some of the precious time left to write?

Also, all the emails/messages, work memos, and social network activities you write may make you feel you already do enough daily writing. However, that writing is often done in auto-pilot mode. While in it we rarely take the time to consider how close what we wrote is to what we think, and how much more clarity could be added to our writing.

I think that there are at least two reasons why it may be worth investing some time on improving your writing.

Making your thoughts easier to consume

We are social animals, and despite how much joy we may get from keeping our thoughts for ourselves we usually can get more of it by sharing them with others. We would like others to really understand how we feel about something, or maybe to know a bit more about that smart idea we had, or to see how much value we can create for them. So, getting better at writing, and communicating in general, may play a big role in terms of how much satisfaction we get when sharing with others.

Nowadays being a good communicator has become even more relevant due to the fact that we live in an attention economy. Being constantly overflown with content and possibilities reduces the time anyone is able to invest on a single source. So, being able to make your message clear and easy to consume is more important than ever.

Improving your thought process

Both what you write and say are the results of the ideas you have, and your thought process in connecting them. You may have a bunch of thoughts on a specific topic, but as long as you keep them in your head, it often remains hard to connect them in a single cohesive view. By preparing them to be shared it becomes easier to draw connections, to challenge their validity, but also to realize that you may have a partial understanding of some parts. It’s not a coincidence that when programmers get stuck on a problem they often try to get unstuck by talking to someone else (including a rubber duck if none is around).

More in general, if what we say and write is the result of our thinking, then inspecting our communication could be a shortcut to inspect our thinking.

At this point you may say that you can already inspect your thought process directly in your mind, and there is no need to express your thoughts in order to judge them. Although this is probably true to an extent, I also think that it’s much easier to dissect a thought after you have expressed it somehow. Moreover, there have been several studies investigating how many objects our working memory can handle simultaneously, and the number seems small. So, using only your mind as a medium you may end up constraining yourself.

When thinking about something, I usually either try to link other concepts to it so that I can create a cohesive view, either try to challenge it. My belief that the quality of an idea depends on how much it has been challenged make the latter activity particularly important. Every time you challenge a specific part of it you remove the unnecessary or add what is missing. So, you go through several cycles of challenging and modifying the idea and make it more robust. I find it considerably more difficult to perform the two steps of this process while at the same time simply keeping the latest version of the idea in mind.

Expressing through speaking or writing

Working on your thoughts by saying them out loud is probably a step in the right direction. At least by doing that you can learn how good of an understanding you have on the topic and what pieces are missing. Still remains the challenge of being able to attack parts of your idea without losing pieces of it. If you are speaking with someone else, then it’s another story, you can have them playing the challenger, and you can only focus on defending the idea and keeping it up. However, as mentioned above, people are pretty busy, and oftentimes they will probably prefer spending their time with you enjoying lighter activities.

When you throw your ideas on paper though, it becomes much easier to spot whether anything is missing, whether anything doesn’t make too much sense. Initially you can focus uniquely on fully expressing it and, once done, you can move the focus on challenging it. So, by simply writing it down, you solved a couple of problems. You clarified how robust your idea is and whether there are missing pieces, and you also freed your brain of it, so that now you can redirect its full power to challenge it as if it was something external.

If you are a supporter of the speaking out loud approach you may enjoy this article on the topic.

Write to re-write

Let’s say I convinced you, and now you believe there is definitely something to gain from writing your thoughts. Now comes the tough part, if the simple act of writing them down solved the problems we discussed, why bother refining your writing?

Since I started caring more about what and how I write I realized that almost always my first writing has two issues. What I write is not exactly what I think, or what I assumed I thought, and a lot of it is unnecessary.

In order to address the first issue I start questioning myself, is this really what I thought? Am I combining several ideas? Is there something else I am giving for granted that I should be added? Also, when I read it again I try to consider how I would feel about it if someone else wrote it, would I think it’s a dumb idea.

Addressing the second issue helps me to actually reconsider what I thought. Am I overcomplicating something that could be much simpler? Am I being too specific and it may be possible to make the idea more general? This is the part of the process which helps the most in improving the way I think about something. Going through this step allows me to find out what should be at the core of the original idea.

I personally feel that going through this process refines my thinking in regard to that specific idea and makes it more robust. Although, I haven’t practiced it enough to see whether it refines my thinking in general.

How to make it easier to write?

Starting a blog could be a good way :-). Although it could also be overkill, keeping a journal is a simpler approach, the final goal remains writing and that’s what you should focus on.

Whether or not you decide to share your writing, I still find helpful, while re-writing, to consider what someone else may think about my writing. Keeping in mind how someone else may feel while reading a piece helps me to consider whether my writing can be made more to the point and easier to consume.

At the same time, the thought of someone else judging your writing may lead you to an analysis-paralysis state of mind in which nothing is good enough to be shared. At the end of the day practicing the process of writing is what matters, so if you feel the burden of an imaginary and demanding reader particularly stressful just ignore it.

How to improve your writing?

Few resources which I found helpful:

The elements of Style contains some good principles and a section on misused words and expressions that could be used as a good reference
Sandy Maguire post on writing technical posts presents one of the two main principles I always keep in mind, write in a way that makes it easy to “skim for concepts”. In a nutshell, the beginning of each section of writing should make it very easy to identify what concept you want to convey.
The other main principle I always keep in mind comes from Eaton Phil blog, and it’s about optimizing your writing to be read
Julian Shapiro guide on writing is quite nice. It offers a nice high-level framework for writing as well as several pragmatic pieces of advice.
It’s worth keeping in mind Paul Graham’s formula for useful writing: importance + novelty + correctness + strength (+ simplicity). I try to keep the formula in mind, without letting it tie my hands. Another gem from the essay worth thinking about “Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false”.

Resources that I haven’t read yet, but I should: