Writing Helps You Think

What I read: Writing as a thinking tool by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

One of the ways I think is through writing. Writing the words that articulate what’s banging around in my brain helps turn that chaos into something coherent and meaningful.

Writing has many science-based benefits. It can help you develop your self-authorship, reflect and create metacognitive routines through journaling, and has been shown to make you happier and healthier. For something that’s completely free, it’s a pretty good deal. Beyond these benefits, writing is also a thinking tool. Not only for personal management, but for ideation as well. From consuming information to creating your own content, writing can be used every step of the way.

I have never been particularly successful with journaling. Although I have a file in my notes app into which I write a few journal-style thoughts now and then, I sometimes go days or weeks without doing it.

Social media has proven to be beneficial to me when it comes to honing my thinking. When posting, I try to craft thoughtful verbiage to accompany the link or image or when posting just text itself. Doing so forces me to make sure I have learned from what I’ve read, watched, listened to, or seen.

Of course, I write posts and articles and have written books. When I write that type of content, it’s incumbent upon me to understand what it is I’m writing about. If presenting on opinion, such writing makes me sure I can back up my opinion with sensible logic or supporting information.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests there are five ways that writing can benefit you.

Writing even a short note about something we read makes us slow down what can often be a funneled torrent of content consumption. This nudges us to become more intentional about the content we consume. It also offers us the opportunity to be more selective about our sources.

Writing to understand the content we read (or consume by seeing or listening) is something my father encouraged me to do since I was quite young. My father was a superlearner. He always rephrased in his own words what he learned. This made him do a self-check on whether he truly understood the material.

Anytime you struggle to write about something you just read, watched, or listen, make sure to take the time to understand properly. The fact that you’re struggling to express it in your own words often means you haven’t completely grasped the new idea.

Writing reinforces our memory. Information is always best remembered if we consciously explain what we’ve learned in our own words rather than passively attempting to absorb it.

Note taking has proven to be effective if done properly but writing about something in well-constructed sentences and paragraphs activates our learning mode more deeply. It fosters the connecting of new information to old which might not happen if we simply consume the information and move on.

Writing also documents what we’ve learned in a tangible, referenceable way. I keep a notes file for each topic area I study. There I keep information, thoughts, reference links, quotations, and so on to prod my memory, especially when it’s been a while since I wrote those notes.

Speaking of connecting dots across information, ideas, and experiences, writing encourages such connections. New ideas emerge. New insights pop into our brains. Forks in the road of inquiry show themselves.

To be able to form such connections, you need a way to retrieve, explore, and edit ideas that pop into your mind. Writing is a great way to create such a searchable database of ideas so you can connect some of them together and generate your own ideas.

It’s scary to write in public, but it serves a useful purpose – generating feedback. Whether it’s a social media entry, blog post, or whatever form of public writing you might engage in, the feedback it spawns will improve your thinking and perhaps offer you new ideas or source material.

Don’t be afraid to show the world your rougher writings. I used to hesitate to publish something because it might have a typo or imprecise wording. Nowadays I’m much more likely to hit the publish button and fix any discovered imperfections after the fact.

Even if writing is something that scares you, I suggest you give it a try. Write a sentence each day, or maybe a paragraph. You’ll be surprised how a tiny bit of writing can blossom into a regular habit.

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