I find if I'm struggling to come up with a word it's because I've lost the conversational flow of the sentence I'm writing, or of the point I'm trying to make.

I find if I'm struggling to come up with a word it's because I've lost the conversational flow of the sentence I'm writing, or of the point I'm trying to make. If I try to describe it out loud to an imaginary or, ideally, a real person, I'm usually then able to convey what I was trying to say, though usually by restructuring the form of the argument, rather than by conveniently finding the right word. Often complex thoughts come to me not as fully constructed sentences. I might forget how I intended to finish a sentence by the time I'm three words in, lost in a forest of opportunities for converting the faint cognitive signal to an established element of prose. I find I am better able to articulate a problem after I've explained it to a number of people on different occasions. The first person I explain it to won't have the foggiest what I'm talking about, probably because I'm constantly grasping for words, but to the fifth person the problem will seem trivial.