Putting Ideas into Words -->
February 2022
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows<br>you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas<br>into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually<br>wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to<br>get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but<br>incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones<br>you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write<br>them.
Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you<br>wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your<br>ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true.<br>You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not<br>just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that<br>turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.
It's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that<br>makes writing so exacting. The real test is reading what you've<br>written. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing<br>of what's in your head, only what you wrote. When he reads what you<br>wrote, does it seem correct? Does it seem complete? If you make an<br>effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger,<br>and when you do the news is usually bad. It takes me many cycles<br>before I can get an essay past the stranger. But the stranger is<br>rational, so you always can, if you ask him what he needs. If he's<br>not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify<br>some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more<br>qualifications. Happy now? It may cost you some nice sentences, but<br>you have to resign yourself to that. You just have to make them as<br>good as you can and still satisfy the stranger.
This much, I assume, won't be that controversial. I think it will<br>accord with the experience of anyone who has tried to write about<br>anything nontrivial. There may exist people whose thoughts are so<br>perfectly formed that they just flow straight into words. But I've<br>never known anyone who could do this, and if I met someone who said<br>they could, it would seem evidence of their limitations rather than<br>their ability. Indeed, this is a trope in movies: the guy who claims<br>to have a plan for doing some difficult thing, and who when questioned<br>further, taps his head and says "It's all up here." Everyone watching<br>the movie knows what that means. At best the plan is vague and<br>incomplete. Very likely there's some undiscovered flaw that invalidates<br>it completely. At best it's a plan for a plan.
In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas<br>in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example.<br>And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though<br>they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till<br>they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can<br>express in a formal language. [1] Arguably what such people are<br>doing is putting ideas into words in their heads. I can to some<br>extent write essays in my head. I'll sometimes think of a paragraph<br>while walking or lying in bed that survives nearly unchanged in the<br>final version. But really I'm writing when I do this. I'm doing the<br>mental part of writing; my fingers just aren't moving as I do it.<br>[2]
You can know a great deal about something without writing about it.<br>Can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying<br>to explain what you know? I don't think so. I've written about at<br>least two subjects I know well — Lisp hacking and startups<br>— and in both cases I learned a lot from writing about them.<br>In both cases there were things I didn't consciously realize till<br>I had to explain them. And I don't think my experience was anomalous.<br>A great deal of knowledge is unconscious, and experts have if<br>anything a higher proportion of unconscious knowledge than beginners.
I'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas.<br>If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to<br>explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm saying is that<br>however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll<br>still learn new things from writing about them.
Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course.<br>You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience,<br>writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal<br>sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of<br>voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem<br>excessive in conversation. I'll often spend 2 weeks on an essay and<br>reread drafts 50 times. If you did that in conversation<br>it would seem evidence of some kind of<br>mental disorder.<br>If you're lazy,<br>of course, writing and talking are equally useless. But if you want<br>to push yourself to get things right, writing is the steeper hill.<br>[3]
The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point<br>is that...