12 ms·

Writing Is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence

529 points by stephsmithio 7y ago

stephsmithio 7y ago
Growing up, writing was often my least favourite thing to do. It still doesn't come "naturally" to me, but this year I starting using a process that makes it easier for me to "show up". I've basically tried to lower the barrier to entry. Curious to know what writing tips or processes others are using to strengthen their "writing muscle".
- johnnysnow 7y ago
  Journaling can help. At the end of the day, you can write about what was interesting or new about your day. It also can help to visualize the reader's response. The reader could be anyone, it could be you in the future long after you've forgotten that specific day. It could be a romantic partner. It could be a friend. Once you have a specific reader visualized, then journaling feels more like having a conversation.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  It may sound silly, but learn to maintain a fountain pen. If you stop writing, the ink dries out. So write a page every day. Yes, you'll be writing about the pen and paper a bit. But your brain will be rewired to move your hand. You'll need to learn the ritual of cleaning the pen with cool water (preferably distilled). You'll love the ritual of carefully opening the bottle of ink, and filling the converter (I recommend a blunt syringe). The bottle is very often beautiful in and of itself. Once you have refilled the pen (and cleaned it off), it begs to be used again. Get good paper, or at least paper able to stand up to proper liquid ink. Eventually, you will find that you're not writing about how well the ink is flowing, or whether the nib is scratchy. You'll be writing out your thoughts on the use of narrative for propaganda, or the challenges of raising children, or the sadness you feel at the change of season. Or you'll write about the pen. You'll get in the habit, though. It will clarify your thoughts. One last recommendation: put the date on each entry. You'll find it interesting later. Fountain pens 101 [1] is a good set of videos for learning about fountain pens. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1AEFDC6AC935BAFC https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1AEFDC6AC935BAFC
  - rexpop 7y ago
    > Yes, you'll be writing about the pen and paper a bit. My diary is full of entries about how I need to cut my fingernails because they're making it hard to type a diary entry.
- ChipSkylark 7y ago
  For me, this is one of the most valuable posts I have seen on hacker news. Thanks for sharing. I strengthen my writing muscle by writing down a foundational "anchor" concept at the top of the page and then writing about it in isolated chunks or paragraphs that use orthogonal approaches (i.e. changing the tone, verbosity, directness, amount of supplemental information). Then I consolidate and prune ideas until I have coherent content. This helps me form my writing style and keep it fresh and dynamic over time. I find that giving yourself the space to express things in new ways helps your audience see how you change as a person over time, which is cool because I feel like I can understand and connect with the author or artist better because I see changes in growth and trajectory.
  - annamargot 7y ago
    I’d love to hear more about this approach. Could you expand on the process in your second paragraph? Also would love to hear how that process informs the experiences mentioned in your third paragraph.
    - ChipSkylark 7y ago
      Sure. I came up with this method on my own but I'm sure someone else has already tried something similar and documented it. Take a piece of paper (or google doc) and put a theme or idea in a single sentence or line of text at the top. Then write a chunk (I'd say 5-10 sentences, but it's arbitrary) below in whatever style naturally comes to you first. Re-read it and note any obvious characteristics about it that jump out at you (e.g. it reads like a research paper, it uses colloquial language, sentences pack a lot of information, my diction is terse, etc - whatever). Then you write a new white space-separated chunk below it where you play with a completely new style, or maybe go in the the opposite direction of something you noticed in the last chunk (be more blunt and terse when your last chunk was long and dense, or maybe introduce fun abstractions and colorful analogy when the last chunk reads like an arXiv paper). Once you feel ready to consolidate it, re-read them and cherry-pick things from each chunk that feel right to you as the writer and synthesize the text into a final piece you are happy with. I'd say you should also timebox consolidation so you actually have something workable in a timely manner. Often times I find that this method creates a balanced style for me, because it is my best effort at emulating my favorite style to read - a style where I never feel like I have the writer "figured out". Bear in mind that this is a completely arbitrary approach and is just how I like to do things. I came up with it from musicianship where you develop your own style by emulating one person, then another, then you have a bag of tricks to pull from when it comes time to decide who you want to be as a creator. Your style may change over time, and I think this method allows it to evolve based on what feels right to you vs. just following what has always worked or what others seem to be happy with.
- wenc 7y ago
  For me, the activation energy for writing used to be high because I found I couldn't muster up inspiration when I needed it. Then I realized something about myself: for me, inspiration is episodic. It comes in chunks, rarely all at once. So my solution was: 1) Observe the world, pay attention to things. 2) Jot down snippets of observations/ideas in a single Google Docs document (available on almost any platform). Don't try to organize it. Keep it really simple. The key is to keep it low effort and frictionless. 3) Look over the Google Docs document from time to time. When you have enough ideas coalescing in a cluster/theme, feel them out. When the cluster feels like it's ready i.e. you feel an emotional connection to it, start writing. Important tip: don't feel you have to finish writing in one sitting -- you can stop, let your writing sit, and keep re-clustering until you have something that is worth putting out there. Gerald Weinberg calls this the Fieldstone method [1] -- the basic idea is to continuously collect, and only write about what you care about. I think it's a useful approach. I personally don't find the streams-of-consciousness approach very compelling (didn't like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway). Streams-of-consciousness is good for very artsy-fartsy, avant-garde type works, but to me good writing comes from a lifetime of collecting experiences, observations and ideas and coalescing them. On mistakes: I used to have a lot of anxiety about my grammar/mechanics because I'm sloppy, but I learned from an editing coach that "everybody could use a good editor". Focus on getting your ideas right -- if it's worth putting out there, you can always hire an editor to help tighten your copy. Development editors will help you build your piece, line/copy editors can fix your style and mechanics, fact-checkers can help with research on veracity. There are at least 9 types of editors, each for different stages of writing [2]. But you have to first have an idea that is worth communicating. [1] https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/hunt-gather-and-build-a-review-of-weinberg-on-writing-the-fieldstone-method.html https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/hunt-gather-... [2] https://blog.reedsy.com/types-of-editing/ https://blog.reedsy.com/types-of-editing/
  - stephsmithio 7y ago
    Thank you for sharing this. I've also been using a similar frictionless observation and clustering method, but I never had a term to label it with. I'll be reading up more on the Fieldstone method.
- CalChris 7y ago
  I think THE most important tool useful towards better writing is better reading. Read the good stuff and avoid the crap. More Orwell and less Kerouac. Just read a lot of the good stuff. I'd say that a cook needs great taste first well before great culinary technique. If you can't taste the difference between crap and haute cuisine then mastering reduction will not help.
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  What's your schooling background? I also grew up with language being very unnatural to me. For me my biggest strides as a writer came from the grind of working hard on long-form essays (or short stories) that I cared about doing well. For me I was driven by producing something I was proud of or communicating arguments well. Sometimes these were research for university classes, sometimes they where theological/political essays for friends/facebook-arguments. There's nothing like spending time on a single piece to develop skills. If you start slow asking yourself questions like "How can I make this sentence/point more straightforward?" and mulling on it and revising, then your brain will start to develop those patterns quicker and you'll get better at putting thoughts directly to the page with less revision needed and you'll build confidence as you get a sense of your own style.
cryptobro1984 7y ago
I've really enjoyed weekly writer's meetups. They come in different flavors, but essentially, writers get together in a coffee shop, chat for 5 minutes, and then write for an hour or two in silence. Helps make writing a little more fun than sitting in a cave by yourself, and it's nice to connect with fellow writers.
- tarosnow 7y ago
  Does it not feel awkward in that one or two hours of silence though?
  - adzm 7y ago
    Not when you realize that everyone else is too busy doing their own thing to pay any attention to you.
- stephsmithio 7y ago
  I think that I would really enjoy attending one of these. How have you gone about finding them? Is there a good online directory of them in different locations?
atoav 7y ago
A technique I often use when I ended up in a confused spot or feel unhappy is to write letters to a person without sending them. Somehow having a person in mind that you have to explain the whole mess to, really fucuses your thoughts and helps you in some way to figure out where you stand faster and more easily.
- xtacy 7y ago
  One of my professors used to say -- Writing is to thinking as alum is to murky water. Indeed, writing makes you crystallise your thoughts.
greggman2 7y ago
I know I struggled with writing when I was in junior high and high school. Now as an adult I find it relatively easy I think. My advice to my junior high school teacher would be to talk to the student (me) about something they enjoy. Whatever that is today I have no idea. Fortnite? Boys? Girls? whatever, ask what the kid is into. Then ask questions about it. Why do they like it? What's so cool about it. What's it like to do. Etc.. After they've talked your ear off for 10 minutes tell them to just write everything they just told you. No idea if that would work but I feel like most people have no trouble talking about things they enjoy. Could be a movie, a TV show, a sport, science, twitter, instagram, no idea. If my 8th grade teacher had not asked me to write but instead just talked with me about say D&D, something I was into, I'm sure I could have spoken 1000-5000 words on it. The same words I'd have said to another kid I wanted to introduce D&D to them. I believe that would have helped me write sooner. I also wonder if the internet is a net plus here. People write short tweets but lots of people write long comments. This comment itself is more than I think I ever wrote on a teacher chosen topic in 8th grade.
- stephsmithio 7y ago
  I think this is a great point. When I was growing up, I really struggled with writing and in hindsight, it was because I had no freedom with it. I was writing about topics that I didn't care about and trying to write in a way that I thought would be graded well. For years after, I thought the struggle I faced just meant that I "wasn't a writer" and avoided it at all costs. Only recently have I started to explore it more due to a strange string of career events, but I hypothesize that many others will never revisit it once they've classified it as something they're not good at.
soneca 7y ago
I write in Portuguese with confidence. Then I started to get confidence writing in English. Then I got confident enough to start writing a newsletter with writing advice in English [0] Then someone in HN commented in one of my posts "I don't trust any writing advice from someone who thinks "certificated" is a word" lol That killed most of my confidence of writing in English and I gave up the idea of having a newsletter. [0] https://writingfordevelopers.substack.com https://writingfordevelopers.substack.com
- ativzzz 7y ago
  The best thing you can do for yourself is ignore comments like that on the internet, or simply treat them as constructive feedback. Meaning, ignore the "I don't trust any writing advice" and just note the typo, fix it, and move on.
  - soneca 7y ago
    That's what I did. But even if consider my advice to be mostly "language agnostic", i.e. not about grammar and orthography, I am pretty sure the recurrent small errors and weird phrasings undermine my reputation as someone that could teach the reader something
    - ahuth 7y ago
      Maybe, but even native speakers have small errors and weird phrasings. Whoever thinks you can’t teach them because of a small typo probably wasn’t going to learn anything anyway.
    - kostarelo 7y ago
      > I am pretty sure the recurrent small errors and weird phrasings undermine my reputation as someone that could teach the reader something I'm living and working in London and English is not my native language. I'm doing lots of grammar and orthography mistakes every day. They really don't matter as long as I'm able to get my point across. That's all it matters. Even if someone was in the position to tell me that they don't trust me, I would leave BUT I would go somewhere else, I wouldn't go back to my home country. Well maybe the above doesn't completely fit your case, I just wanted to share my 2 cents. OS: I have been writing in my tech blog in English the past 5 years. Often times I'm catching my self reading my older posts and just can't stand them. They are awful. :D
CalChris 7y ago
Thinking is thinking and writing is writing. We regret the confusion. Writing is work. You start with words on paper (or on a laptop) and you keep on working until it isn't crap. You start with something. You end with something better. What your college writing instructors were teaching you was your mistakes. Think about them and remember them. When they pointed out a mistake, keep on a lookout because you'll make that mistake again. People don't make random mistakes. They are very systematic in their mistakes. I still remember my corrections. When I was in college my trick was to get a draft done a week before the deadline. It wasn't perfect. It was anything but perfect. But it was something. It said roughly, not perfectly by any stretch, what I wanted to say. Then I wrote, rewrote, edited, deleted, added, corrected, reworded, reordered, cited, formatted, spell checked, grammar checked, perfected, critiqued, tweaked, read aloud, questioned, ... on up to the deadline. I worked. I didn't think. I worked. I didn't wait for some great thought to descend upon me from the clouds at the deadline (that works for Maureen Dowd but I'm not Maureen Dowd; she has talent and I don't). I worked. Fact is, I enjoyed my work. Pretty much a day before the deadline, I was damned cocky about my writing (lowest essay grade, A-) and then I really started having fun. At that point, I was relaxed and I really knew what I wanted. Like a cook who enjoys their own cooking, when I go back to re-read it, I thoroughly enjoy my own writing. The work and the craft show, to me at least. And if it doesn't show to me then it can't show to someone else. Writing is work. It is closer to restaurant prep than it is to confiserie.
- gkolli 7y ago
  Thank you for writing this; felt like a breath of fresh air.
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  I had a similar experience in university, and your post makes me feel nostalgic for the times of having nothing to do but work on an essay and think about my language and the craft. :) > Thinking is thinking and writing is writing. We regret the confusion. You're right that the headline is oversimplified; and saying this might even obfuscate the point it's trying to make, which is that writing can be a tool to clarify thinking. This I sympathize with. Thoughts can be slippery and emotional and fallacious, but writing them down helps build compound thoughts and gives you leverage to organize them into a more coherent/rational narrative. So I think it's worth spreading the notion that writing is not just for communication, but can be a tool for thinking.
mttyng 7y ago
It’s exceedingly difficult to write clearly and get your point across, and this is especially true for technical subject matter. Steven Pinker calls this the “blindness of expertise” which prohibits us from explaining concepts we’re familiar with in a clear way because we assume the reader to have more knowledge than they actually do. Reading his book, “A Sense of Style” made a lot of things clearer to me in terms of writing. I recommend the book highly, even though it gets _super_ deep on grammatical structure and, from my perspective, that tended to be a little dry (and over my head).
- ihadfun 7y ago
  Sounds like the author was blind to his expertise.
  - mttyng 7y ago
    Ha! Good point. Although, I don’t think I was the targeted audience. It seemed to be more geared towards individuals that label themselves as “writers”. I remember practically nothing from my grammar education. Terminology like “definite article” might as well be Mandarin.
    - therealdrag0 7y ago
      :) I also loved that book. I developed, what I like to think of as a sense of style, while getting an English degree, and the main tools/advice I developed totally line up with what he shared in the book.
nixarian 7y ago
If writing is thinking, how are there feminist writers?
deleted 7y ago
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Roritharr 7y ago
I always stop myself writing longer professional articles as what I'd like to write doesnt fit my own bar of quality requirements. I have some experience in a couple of fields and deeper experience in a few, but I can't really point to any studies that would underpin any learnings or points I'd like to make and without those I feel what ever I write becomes just the ramblings of someone vaguely qualified. I have a much easier time giving advice in person, sometimes having a couple of people invite me to observe & coach, but somehow writing feels like it requires so much more care and study that it frightens me to start.
- ribs 7y ago
  I hear all that, but you know how it is about writing - you can help dozen / hundreds / thousands of people at once. It’s probably worth it to write something and show it to some people.
sheinsheish 7y ago
I write in English. Not a lot but I do. It’s not my native language though. My mother language is greek. I grew up in Greece, then in age of around 23 went to study piano in Germany for 5 years and instead of going back to Greece I landed in Croatia. Here I had to learn a complete new (Slavic?) language. It took me 3 years. In the meantime I was consuming English content in the “usually suspicious” ways, internet, software, books, movies, tv etc. The way I communicated with my wife was in german first(where we met), then a little greek and after we got back to Zagreb / Croatia, we crossfaded to croatian the more I learned it. My point is: I can read and write a specific language (croatian or english better the other two less) the same goes for talking. But there’s absolute no distinction whatsoever in my head about what is the way I think in : croatian or greek? I really don’t know. It’s like a fog or cloud. What do you guys think ?
- shakna 7y ago
  Most of the time I think in a cloud of English and images and... Well, ideas. But, if I spend more time around Spanish speakers, which was my birth language, I find I do switch out the English for Spanish. I'd expect most people with a multilingual background are similar. Your thoughts express with whatever language your brain is most comfortable with at the moment.
- jhrmnn 7y ago
  My own personal theory of mind is heavily inspired by David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. There he describes a model of mind in which a multitude of independent "agents" propose "ideas", which bubble up to our consciousness (the top-level agents), which pick some of these ideas according to some (to us) opaque key. In this model, I imagine that many of these low-level ideas start in a non-language form, and as they bubble up to the higher levels of the mind, they get wrapped in language, as they are processed by consciousness. But since things are not simple, the higher-level agents can modulate the lower-level ones, and that's how the language parts of our minds can influence the non-language (emotional?) parts. I have experienced several instances of purely rational cognition imprinting into my emotional perception of reality.
- MattLeBlanc001 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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529 points by stephsmithio 7y ago

Growing up, writing was often my least favourite thing to do. It still doesn't come "naturally" to me, but this year I starting using a process that makes it easier for me to "show up". I've basically tried to lower the barrier to entry. Curious to know what writing tips or processes others are using to strengthen their "writing muscle".

johnnysnow 7y ago
Journaling can help. At the end of the day, you can write about what was interesting or new about your day. It also can help to visualize the reader's response. The reader could be anyone, it could be you in the future long after you've forgotten that specific day. It could be a romantic partner. It could be a friend. Once you have a specific reader visualized, then journaling feels more like having a conversation.
slowmovintarget 7y ago
It may sound silly, but learn to maintain a fountain pen. If you stop writing, the ink dries out. So write a page every day. Yes, you'll be writing about the pen and paper a bit. But your brain will be rewired to move your hand. You'll need to learn the ritual of cleaning the pen with cool water (preferably distilled). You'll love the ritual of carefully opening the bottle of ink, and filling the converter (I recommend a blunt syringe). The bottle is very often beautiful in and of itself. Once you have refilled the pen (and cleaned it off), it begs to be used again. Get good paper, or at least paper able to stand up to proper liquid ink. Eventually, you will find that you're not writing about how well the ink is flowing, or whether the nib is scratchy. You'll be writing out your thoughts on the use of narrative for propaganda, or the challenges of raising children, or the sadness you feel at the change of season. Or you'll write about the pen. You'll get in the habit, though. It will clarify your thoughts. One last recommendation: put the date on each entry. You'll find it interesting later. Fountain pens 101 [1] is a good set of videos for learning about fountain pens. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1AEFDC6AC935BAFC https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1AEFDC6AC935BAFC
- rexpop 7y ago
  > Yes, you'll be writing about the pen and paper a bit. My diary is full of entries about how I need to cut my fingernails because they're making it hard to type a diary entry.
ChipSkylark 7y ago
For me, this is one of the most valuable posts I have seen on hacker news. Thanks for sharing. I strengthen my writing muscle by writing down a foundational "anchor" concept at the top of the page and then writing about it in isolated chunks or paragraphs that use orthogonal approaches (i.e. changing the tone, verbosity, directness, amount of supplemental information). Then I consolidate and prune ideas until I have coherent content. This helps me form my writing style and keep it fresh and dynamic over time. I find that giving yourself the space to express things in new ways helps your audience see how you change as a person over time, which is cool because I feel like I can understand and connect with the author or artist better because I see changes in growth and trajectory.
- annamargot 7y ago
  I’d love to hear more about this approach. Could you expand on the process in your second paragraph? Also would love to hear how that process informs the experiences mentioned in your third paragraph.
  - ChipSkylark 7y ago
    Sure. I came up with this method on my own but I'm sure someone else has already tried something similar and documented it. Take a piece of paper (or google doc) and put a theme or idea in a single sentence or line of text at the top. Then write a chunk (I'd say 5-10 sentences, but it's arbitrary) below in whatever style naturally comes to you first. Re-read it and note any obvious characteristics about it that jump out at you (e.g. it reads like a research paper, it uses colloquial language, sentences pack a lot of information, my diction is terse, etc - whatever). Then you write a new white space-separated chunk below it where you play with a completely new style, or maybe go in the the opposite direction of something you noticed in the last chunk (be more blunt and terse when your last chunk was long and dense, or maybe introduce fun abstractions and colorful analogy when the last chunk reads like an arXiv paper). Once you feel ready to consolidate it, re-read them and cherry-pick things from each chunk that feel right to you as the writer and synthesize the text into a final piece you are happy with. I'd say you should also timebox consolidation so you actually have something workable in a timely manner. Often times I find that this method creates a balanced style for me, because it is my best effort at emulating my favorite style to read - a style where I never feel like I have the writer "figured out". Bear in mind that this is a completely arbitrary approach and is just how I like to do things. I came up with it from musicianship where you develop your own style by emulating one person, then another, then you have a bag of tricks to pull from when it comes time to decide who you want to be as a creator. Your style may change over time, and I think this method allows it to evolve based on what feels right to you vs. just following what has always worked or what others seem to be happy with.
wenc 7y ago
For me, the activation energy for writing used to be high because I found I couldn't muster up inspiration when I needed it. Then I realized something about myself: for me, inspiration is episodic. It comes in chunks, rarely all at once. So my solution was: 1) Observe the world, pay attention to things. 2) Jot down snippets of observations/ideas in a single Google Docs document (available on almost any platform). Don't try to organize it. Keep it really simple. The key is to keep it low effort and frictionless. 3) Look over the Google Docs document from time to time. When you have enough ideas coalescing in a cluster/theme, feel them out. When the cluster feels like it's ready i.e. you feel an emotional connection to it, start writing. Important tip: don't feel you have to finish writing in one sitting -- you can stop, let your writing sit, and keep re-clustering until you have something that is worth putting out there. Gerald Weinberg calls this the Fieldstone method [1] -- the basic idea is to continuously collect, and only write about what you care about. I think it's a useful approach. I personally don't find the streams-of-consciousness approach very compelling (didn't like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway). Streams-of-consciousness is good for very artsy-fartsy, avant-garde type works, but to me good writing comes from a lifetime of collecting experiences, observations and ideas and coalescing them. On mistakes: I used to have a lot of anxiety about my grammar/mechanics because I'm sloppy, but I learned from an editing coach that "everybody could use a good editor". Focus on getting your ideas right -- if it's worth putting out there, you can always hire an editor to help tighten your copy. Development editors will help you build your piece, line/copy editors can fix your style and mechanics, fact-checkers can help with research on veracity. There are at least 9 types of editors, each for different stages of writing [2]. But you have to first have an idea that is worth communicating. [1] https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/hunt-gather-and-build-a-review-of-weinberg-on-writing-the-fieldstone-method.html https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/hunt-gather-... [2] https://blog.reedsy.com/types-of-editing/ https://blog.reedsy.com/types-of-editing/
- stephsmithio 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. I've also been using a similar frictionless observation and clustering method, but I never had a term to label it with. I'll be reading up more on the Fieldstone method.
CalChris 7y ago
I think THE most important tool useful towards better writing is better reading. Read the good stuff and avoid the crap. More Orwell and less Kerouac. Just read a lot of the good stuff. I'd say that a cook needs great taste first well before great culinary technique. If you can't taste the difference between crap and haute cuisine then mastering reduction will not help.
therealdrag0 7y ago
What's your schooling background? I also grew up with language being very unnatural to me. For me my biggest strides as a writer came from the grind of working hard on long-form essays (or short stories) that I cared about doing well. For me I was driven by producing something I was proud of or communicating arguments well. Sometimes these were research for university classes, sometimes they where theological/political essays for friends/facebook-arguments. There's nothing like spending time on a single piece to develop skills. If you start slow asking yourself questions like "How can I make this sentence/point more straightforward?" and mulling on it and revising, then your brain will start to develop those patterns quicker and you'll get better at putting thoughts directly to the page with less revision needed and you'll build confidence as you get a sense of your own style.

cryptobro1984 7y ago

I've really enjoyed weekly writer's meetups. They come in different flavors, but essentially, writers get together in a coffee shop, chat for 5 minutes, and then write for an hour or two in silence. Helps make writing a little more fun than sitting in a cave by yourself, and it's nice to connect with fellow writers.

tarosnow 7y ago
Does it not feel awkward in that one or two hours of silence though?
- adzm 7y ago
  Not when you realize that everyone else is too busy doing their own thing to pay any attention to you.
stephsmithio 7y ago
I think that I would really enjoy attending one of these. How have you gone about finding them? Is there a good online directory of them in different locations?

atoav 7y ago

A technique I often use when I ended up in a confused spot or feel unhappy is to write letters to a person without sending them. Somehow having a person in mind that you have to explain the whole mess to, really fucuses your thoughts and helps you in some way to figure out where you stand faster and more easily.

xtacy 7y ago
One of my professors used to say -- Writing is to thinking as alum is to murky water. Indeed, writing makes you crystallise your thoughts.

greggman2 7y ago

I know I struggled with writing when I was in junior high and high school. Now as an adult I find it relatively easy I think. My advice to my junior high school teacher would be to talk to the student (me) about something they enjoy. Whatever that is today I have no idea. Fortnite? Boys? Girls? whatever, ask what the kid is into. Then ask questions about it. Why do they like it? What's so cool about it. What's it like to do. Etc.. After they've talked your ear off for 10 minutes tell them to just write everything they just told you. No idea if that would work but I feel like most people have no trouble talking about things they enjoy. Could be a movie, a TV show, a sport, science, twitter, instagram, no idea. If my 8th grade teacher had not asked me to write but instead just talked with me about say D&D, something I was into, I'm sure I could have spoken 1000-5000 words on it. The same words I'd have said to another kid I wanted to introduce D&D to them. I believe that would have helped me write sooner. I also wonder if the internet is a net plus here. People write short tweets but lots of people write long comments. This comment itself is more than I think I ever wrote on a teacher chosen topic in 8th grade.

stephsmithio 7y ago
I think this is a great point. When I was growing up, I really struggled with writing and in hindsight, it was because I had no freedom with it. I was writing about topics that I didn't care about and trying to write in a way that I thought would be graded well. For years after, I thought the struggle I faced just meant that I "wasn't a writer" and avoided it at all costs. Only recently have I started to explore it more due to a strange string of career events, but I hypothesize that many others will never revisit it once they've classified it as something they're not good at.

soneca 7y ago

I write in Portuguese with confidence. Then I started to get confidence writing in English. Then I got confident enough to start writing a newsletter with writing advice in English [0] Then someone in HN commented in one of my posts "I don't trust any writing advice from someone who thinks "certificated" is a word" lol That killed most of my confidence of writing in English and I gave up the idea of having a newsletter. [0] https://writingfordevelopers.substack.com https://writingfordevelopers.substack.com

ativzzz 7y ago
The best thing you can do for yourself is ignore comments like that on the internet, or simply treat them as constructive feedback. Meaning, ignore the "I don't trust any writing advice" and just note the typo, fix it, and move on.
- soneca 7y ago
  That's what I did. But even if consider my advice to be mostly "language agnostic", i.e. not about grammar and orthography, I am pretty sure the recurrent small errors and weird phrasings undermine my reputation as someone that could teach the reader something
  - ahuth 7y ago
    Maybe, but even native speakers have small errors and weird phrasings. Whoever thinks you can’t teach them because of a small typo probably wasn’t going to learn anything anyway.
  - kostarelo 7y ago
    > I am pretty sure the recurrent small errors and weird phrasings undermine my reputation as someone that could teach the reader something I'm living and working in London and English is not my native language. I'm doing lots of grammar and orthography mistakes every day. They really don't matter as long as I'm able to get my point across. That's all it matters. Even if someone was in the position to tell me that they don't trust me, I would leave BUT I would go somewhere else, I wouldn't go back to my home country. Well maybe the above doesn't completely fit your case, I just wanted to share my 2 cents. OS: I have been writing in my tech blog in English the past 5 years. Often times I'm catching my self reading my older posts and just can't stand them. They are awful. :D

CalChris 7y ago

Thinking is thinking and writing is writing. We regret the confusion. Writing is work. You start with words on paper (or on a laptop) and you keep on working until it isn't crap. You start with something. You end with something better. What your college writing instructors were teaching you was your mistakes. Think about them and remember them. When they pointed out a mistake, keep on a lookout because you'll make that mistake again. People don't make random mistakes. They are very systematic in their mistakes. I still remember my corrections. When I was in college my trick was to get a draft done a week before the deadline. It wasn't perfect. It was anything but perfect. But it was something. It said roughly, not perfectly by any stretch, what I wanted to say. Then I wrote, rewrote, edited, deleted, added, corrected, reworded, reordered, cited, formatted, spell checked, grammar checked, perfected, critiqued, tweaked, read aloud, questioned, ... on up to the deadline. I worked. I didn't think. I worked. I didn't wait for some great thought to descend upon me from the clouds at the deadline (that works for Maureen Dowd but I'm not Maureen Dowd; she has talent and I don't). I worked. Fact is, I enjoyed my work. Pretty much a day before the deadline, I was damned cocky about my writing (lowest essay grade, A-) and then I really started having fun. At that point, I was relaxed and I really knew what I wanted. Like a cook who enjoys their own cooking, when I go back to re-read it, I thoroughly enjoy my own writing. The work and the craft show, to me at least. And if it doesn't show to me then it can't show to someone else. Writing is work. It is closer to restaurant prep than it is to confiserie.

gkolli 7y ago
Thank you for writing this; felt like a breath of fresh air.
therealdrag0 7y ago
I had a similar experience in university, and your post makes me feel nostalgic for the times of having nothing to do but work on an essay and think about my language and the craft. :) > Thinking is thinking and writing is writing. We regret the confusion. You're right that the headline is oversimplified; and saying this might even obfuscate the point it's trying to make, which is that writing can be a tool to clarify thinking. This I sympathize with. Thoughts can be slippery and emotional and fallacious, but writing them down helps build compound thoughts and gives you leverage to organize them into a more coherent/rational narrative. So I think it's worth spreading the notion that writing is not just for communication, but can be a tool for thinking.

mttyng 7y ago

It’s exceedingly difficult to write clearly and get your point across, and this is especially true for technical subject matter. Steven Pinker calls this the “blindness of expertise” which prohibits us from explaining concepts we’re familiar with in a clear way because we assume the reader to have more knowledge than they actually do. Reading his book, “A Sense of Style” made a lot of things clearer to me in terms of writing. I recommend the book highly, even though it gets _super_ deep on grammatical structure and, from my perspective, that tended to be a little dry (and over my head).

ihadfun 7y ago
Sounds like the author was blind to his expertise.
- mttyng 7y ago
  Ha! Good point. Although, I don’t think I was the targeted audience. It seemed to be more geared towards individuals that label themselves as “writers”. I remember practically nothing from my grammar education. Terminology like “definite article” might as well be Mandarin.
  - therealdrag0 7y ago
    :) I also loved that book. I developed, what I like to think of as a sense of style, while getting an English degree, and the main tools/advice I developed totally line up with what he shared in the book.

nixarian 7y ago

If writing is thinking, how are there feminist writers?

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Roritharr 7y ago

I always stop myself writing longer professional articles as what I'd like to write doesnt fit my own bar of quality requirements. I have some experience in a couple of fields and deeper experience in a few, but I can't really point to any studies that would underpin any learnings or points I'd like to make and without those I feel what ever I write becomes just the ramblings of someone vaguely qualified. I have a much easier time giving advice in person, sometimes having a couple of people invite me to observe & coach, but somehow writing feels like it requires so much more care and study that it frightens me to start.

ribs 7y ago
I hear all that, but you know how it is about writing - you can help dozen / hundreds / thousands of people at once. It’s probably worth it to write something and show it to some people.

sheinsheish 7y ago

I write in English. Not a lot but I do. It’s not my native language though. My mother language is greek. I grew up in Greece, then in age of around 23 went to study piano in Germany for 5 years and instead of going back to Greece I landed in Croatia. Here I had to learn a complete new (Slavic?) language. It took me 3 years. In the meantime I was consuming English content in the “usually suspicious” ways, internet, software, books, movies, tv etc. The way I communicated with my wife was in german first(where we met), then a little greek and after we got back to Zagreb / Croatia, we crossfaded to croatian the more I learned it. My point is: I can read and write a specific language (croatian or english better the other two less) the same goes for talking. But there’s absolute no distinction whatsoever in my head about what is the way I think in : croatian or greek? I really don’t know. It’s like a fog or cloud. What do you guys think ?

shakna 7y ago
Most of the time I think in a cloud of English and images and... Well, ideas. But, if I spend more time around Spanish speakers, which was my birth language, I find I do switch out the English for Spanish. I'd expect most people with a multilingual background are similar. Your thoughts express with whatever language your brain is most comfortable with at the moment.
jhrmnn 7y ago
My own personal theory of mind is heavily inspired by David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. There he describes a model of mind in which a multitude of independent "agents" propose "ideas", which bubble up to our consciousness (the top-level agents), which pick some of these ideas according to some (to us) opaque key. In this model, I imagine that many of these low-level ideas start in a non-language form, and as they bubble up to the higher levels of the mind, they get wrapped in language, as they are processed by consciousness. But since things are not simple, the higher-level agents can modulate the lower-level ones, and that's how the language parts of our minds can influence the non-language (emotional?) parts. I have experienced several instances of purely rational cognition imprinting into my emotional perception of reality.
MattLeBlanc001 7y ago

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