You’ve probably picked up by now that I’m a big fan of writing. I wrote You should write more six years ago, and I’ve been advocating a daily writing practice more recently. Most of that has been advocacy for writing to be read - stuff you’ll publish, probably on a blog. Although the writing itself has many benefits in and of itself, the ultimate purpose of it is to produce something that someone else will read.
> With this increased working memory comes increased power and clarity of thought, because one of the key advantages of writing over thinking out loud is that it turns your thoughts into objects that you can manipulate. You can look at the things you’ve written, you can manipulate them, you can go “Is that right…?” and correct them, you can make connections that you wouldn’t have seen without making them explicit.
A slightly different flavour of this same point that I find useful: 'objectifying' my thoughts in writing also make them less personal and emotive and therefore more likely that I'll see them … well, more objectively :D So as well as the increased working memory and manipulability, there is a qualitative change to my relationship to the thoughts, too.
> With this increased working memory comes increased power and clarity of thought, because one of the key advantages of writing over thinking out loud is that it turns your thoughts into objects that you can manipulate. You can look at the things you’ve written, you can manipulate them, you can go “Is that right…?” and correct them, you can make connections that you wouldn’t have seen without making them explicit.
A slightly different flavour of this same point that I find useful: 'objectifying' my thoughts in writing also make them less personal and emotive and therefore more likely that I'll see them … well, more objectively :D So as well as the increased working memory and manipulability, there is a qualitative change to my relationship to the thoughts, too.