Intro

Writing and speaking are two ways to process our thoughts. But, writing takes it a step further: it allows us to refine, clarify and organise our thinking into something concrete. In this article, I’ll share how has writing helped me achieve clarity of thought.

Writing

Writing allows us to note down our unprocessed thoughts on a piece of paper or digital document. If our thoughts are all over the place, our writing will reflect it. But by committing them to a concrete form, we can take a look, analyze and refine our thinking.

While writing the first draft for this article, I wanted to focus on how writing reflects the way we speak. Simply put, messy writing equates to incoherent speaking. But through many drafts, I’ve realised it’s our unprocessed thoughts that cause incoherent speaking rather than messy writing. Thus, we can use writing as a tool to gain clarity in our thoughts, and this was the realisation I had when writing this article.

As we write, our head offloads the thoughts we have. It frees up mental space, allowing new thoughts to surface instead of repeating old ones. It’s only by writing, that it acts as a mirror for us to look at our thoughts and say: Have I been thinking like that?

Speaking

So, what about speaking? While it can help us make sense of our unprocessed thoughts, it often leaves others confused due to the lack of coherence in our speech.

When I tried explaining my interest in local-first software and how CRDT (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) plays a part to a friend, I found myself providing vague descriptions of both technologies and having to re-explain it multiple times. The look of confusion on his face as I speak made me realised that I have not understood the technologies clearly.

It’s like a writer releasing a first draft of his work to the public, it only makes sense to him and not the readers. As we speak, we are also trying to comprehend and gather our thoughts to respond to questions and hold a conversation. With so much going on there isn’t much space for us to process it properly.

Silent thinking

What about silent thinking? While it’s a natural way to process thoughts, it often leads to mental clutter. Without an outlet, the same thoughts circles in our head, taking up mental bandwidth, and prevents us from forming new thoughts.

Final Thoughts

Writing is not easy, yet, if it’s one of the ways that can give me clarity of thought I’ll take it. I rewrote the article a few times before I was satisfied with it. I hope that the article is clear enough, it’d be an irony if it isn’t.