Writing is Thinking

Jan. 2, 2025

I've come across the expression "writing is thinking" several times. The original quote appears to be:

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough.

Writing has never been my strong suit. In school, I failed English class several times due to lack of interest, and reading and writing were often my least favorite subjects. As such, I have never really developed a good knack for it. I am not good at organizing my thoughts. My personal journal is often scattered and my train of thought is constantly derailing. This post is probably going to end up similarly meandering about without getting to the point, but here I am anyway.

Writing is thinking. What does that mean? To write down your ideas is to organize them. I struggle with very scattered thinking. Something that has characterized my thinking my whole life. I think that's probably why I never really enjoyed writing down my thoughts. Seeing my thoughts down on paper (or on a computer screen) just put the reality of my disorganized thinking right in front of me. I was forced to look right at disorganized thoughts. But something else starts to happen when I force myself to sit down and do it anyway. I start to edit. I reread. I think about what I just wrote. Does it make sense? Why did I write it that way? It forces me to answer questions that I wouldn't have been able to reflect on had I not just written them down and read them again. I think.

I have a tendency to blurt out half-baked thoughts and ideas. When I speak, I just talk. Often faster than my brain has time to process what I just said. I say things I hadn't really thought through, I say things I later realize were wrong, I say things I wish I hadn't, because I'm not really thinking as hard when I'm speaking. But when I write, even the little bits I do and even in my inexperienced and poor structure that I do it in, thinking becomes just a part of the process. I have a moment before I send the chat message or email. I have a moment before submitting this post. I can pause, I can reflect, and think about what I just wrote.

Writing is communication. As a programmer, I often have an abstract idea of what I'm trying to accomplish in my head. When I reach a point where I need to ask for help or communicate an idea to a colleague, I find myself getting frustrated that I can't just transmit the idea right into their head. I have to sit down and think about how to specifically communicate this complex and abstract concept from my head into an imperfect an often vague language of English and ensure that the picture that ends up in their head matches mine. Often the very act of attempting to write that idea down and communicate it causes me to find flaws in my approach.

Writing is organization. This is especially true if you're writing on a computer, where you can shift sentences and paragraphs around. Add parts. Remove parts. Edit parts. The ability to restructure your thought in order to organize your thought is a powerful tool. It's like taking that scattered cloud of thoughts and forcing them to be sorted in some order. As a programmer, this makes a lot of sense to me.

Writing in the Age of LLMs

The pervasiveness of chat-based AI/large language models is a double-edged sword when it comes to writing. Suddenly, writing as a skill has actually become more important, while at the same time we're automating a lot of writing.

The problems that exist in communication between humans are amplified when dealing with an LLM because it's not capable of knowing you personally, what you mean by your words, your tone in what your say, your background, the context beyond what you gave, and dwell on your words to think about what you just said. LLMs are a more complex Markov-chain capable of only generating context that pattern-matches human output. Don't get me wrong, they're impressive, but that's not the point of this post. My point is that specificity of speech, concise language, and context are much more important when attempting to get an LLM to create a specific output for you. I've found myself actually becoming better at describing my issues when attempting to get an LLM to help me with a problem or if I'm trying to get an image generator to generate a specific scene. As a result of this, success with chat-interfaced LLMs will largely be determined by your ability to write.

On the flip side, the ability to pump out articles, books, podcast scripts, youtube videos, etc, all with the help of LLMs mean that we're going to be reading a lot of LLM-generated content. Hopefully that content is carefully curated with the help of a person trying to organize their thoughts. Maybe the LLM can even help that person convey certain thoughts in a way that would have been difficult for that individual. Maybe this can be a good thing. One thing is for sure though: we're automating writing. Are we automating thinking?

I'm not entirely sure if it matters in the former though. Many of the people whose articles I read are ideas distilled from many others ideas. Many books are condensed ideas that span history or old philosophical texts. Perhaps the entire concept that a human can have an entirely original thought itself is challenged by the existence of LLMs and the idea that maybe we ourselves are some form of automaton. I'll leave that rabbit hole for another time though.

Write Anyway

I'm a programmer and most of what I'm expected to write is cold logical code. Meant to be understood by another programmer, but executed by a computer. If I work by myself, I need to convey my thoughts in a document for my future self. Maybe I need to plan my project and organize my thoughts that way. Maybe I'm working on a team and need to communicate code design or architecture to a teammate. Maybe I'm writing up a bug report and need to be specific about my environment, the steps I took to cause the issue and what attempts I've already made to resolve or diagnose it. If you're in another professional field and think that writing doesn't matter to you, it almost certainly matters in your personal life. How do you communicate with your friends? How do you communicate with your partner? Do you need to have a tough conversation? Have you thought through how you're going to approach that? Are your own thoughts scattered and you want to organize them?

Regardless of what your reasoning is. Write. Don't automate away your thinking. Don't let your more important ideas and thoughts just dump out of you with no reflection or thought. It doesn't have to be public. Just write.