Writing To Learn
What I read: Learning By Writing by Holden Karnofsky. Published February 22, 2022.
How we learn best is a topic of deep interest for me. I wrote a book about learning, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling, and wrote here on my Substack blog about Learning How To Learn. As a lifelong autodidact and avid reader, ongoing learning is important to me.
So, when I ran across this article by Holden Karnofsky, it immediately caught my attention. Learning by writing is something I’ve done most of my life. I appreciated Karnofsky detailing his own process for learning using writing as the organizing mechanism.
…this piece will try to give a sense of how to get an in-depth investigation off the ground, going from “I’ve never heard of this topic before” to “Let me tell you all my thoughts on that.”
The rough basic idea is that I organize my learning around writing rather than reading. This doesn’t mean I don’t read - just that the reading is always in service of the writing.
This is often what I do. One of the reasons I write is because the act of writing forces me to struggle with the ideas, concepts, and information that supports the writing. My father, who spent much of his life as an esteemed college professor, used to tell me that one of the best ways to learn something is to be able to articulate specifics about it to someone else. Good writing does that.
Being a generalist, I find much of life fascinating. That means I often know next to nothing about a topic before beginning to investigate it. A good friend of mine in the medical profession was talking to me recently about how medical procedures are often taught using a “watch it, do it, teach it” methodology. The “teach it” part is much like the writing I do, even if the person I’m teaching is actually myself.
Karnofsky outlines his process this way.
Step 1: Pick a topic.
Step 2: Read and/or discuss with others (a bit).
Step 3: Explain and defend my current, incredibly premature hypothesis, in writing (or conversation).
Step 4: Find and list weaknesses in my case.
Step 5: Pick a subquestion and do more reading/discussing.
Step 6: Revise my claim / switch sides.
Step 7: Repeat steps 3-6 a bunch.
Step 8: Get feedback on a draft from others, and use this to keep repeating steps 3-6.
That’s far more organized than my typical approach. It’s more rigorous. Perhaps I should adopt some of that rigor. I’ve never been great with following ordered processes outside of a business environment. My learning can look a bit chaotic from the outside, but the truth is my process works for me. Here’s what my own process tends to look like.
Something triggers my interest. It might be a random article, passage in a book, or an idea from a movie or documentary. It could be anything. Topics I never thought I’d care about investigating unexpectedly pop up and I become incredibly passionate about them.
Decide how much I want to learn. Maybe it’s something I just want to familiarize myself with or maybe I want to dive more deeply into it. Sometimes I just want to know a little bit about something to satisfy my curiosity. Sometimes I want to know as much about something as possible because it resonates with me so strongly or the knowledge will be useful.
Gather information. Typically I read, a lot. Articles. Websites. Books. My preferred method of learning tends to be reading, but I also watch videos, documentaries, and listen to podcast recordings. There’s not much of an organized process to this. I tend to randomly skip around to various sources as they seem worth pursuing.
Take notes. I’m a big note taker. I wrote a bit about my note taking process in In Praise Of Note Taking.
Percolate. Percolate is my own term for allowing my brain to consciously and unconsciously start connecting dots between ideas and concepts and generally letting myself solidify learning. I remember as a child some of the popular coffee makers were called percolators. I would imagine they were doing some magic inside them to create the finished product of coffee. For some reason I would joke that’s what my brain would do when I was learning something. My favorite way to let my brain percolate is to go on long walks and think about what I’ve learned, connecting the new learning to old learning which tends to cement it best in my brain.
Talk about it. When possible, I talk about the topic to a friend or a group interested in the same topic. Anyone who knows me knows I like to talk. This includes online friends and groups. By speaking about it, having to articulate clearly an idea or relay information effectively, requires me to hone my own thinking about it.
Write something. Finally, I write. Sometimes I write an article. Sometimes a blog post. Sometimes the equivalent of a research paper. Sometimes a journal entry. Sometimes something as simple as a long social media post. The act of writing, struggling with finding the right words to explain something, holds me accountable that I did in fact learn what I studied.
On occasion I’ve solicited feedback from others about the written piece. Certainly if I’m working with a publication paying me for the work I’m often beholden to an editor. But editors aren’t always topic experts. So perhaps Karnofsky’s idea of getting feedback is something I’ll give a try more often.
Karnofsky’s rigor of challenging his own contentions and ideas is also something I respect. I try to remain open to opposing views and contrasting opinions, but that’s a rather light touch compared to intentionally finding weakness in my own arguments as Karnofsky does.
Much of Karnofsky’s writing sets out to support or discount a stated idea, fact, concept, or belief. He plays devil’s advocate far more than I do. This strengthens my resolve to be a bit more steadfast in challenging my own conclusions. My writing tends to be less argument and more ponderings and musings, but there are definitely times I write to defend a stance or discount someone else’s. So Karnofsky’s process to not accept at face value his first assumptions are a good thing to add to my learning toolkit.
The “traditionally” hard parts of this process are steps 4 and 6: spotting weaknesses in arguments, trying to resist the temptation to “stick to my guns” when my original hypothesis isn’t looking so good, etc.
Like Karnofsky, being able to concisely summarize or explain something helps me to focus my learning better. Much like the Executive Summary section you often see at the beginning of business and research reports, summarizing what I’ve learned and my thoughts about it keeps me on track. The simpler the summary is, the better.
…I try to continually focus my reading on the goal of forming a bottom-line view, rather than just “gathering information.” I think this makes my investigations more focused and directed, and the results easier to retain. I consider this approach to be probably the single biggest difference-maker between "reading a ton about lots of things, but retaining little" and "efficiently developing a set of views on key topics and retaining the reasoning behind them."
I like that Karnofsky admits how writing anything on the page, even random thoughts and ideas, tends to act as an organizing factor while learning.
…at this stage the hypothesis is more about setting the stage for more questions about investigation than about really trying to be right, so it seems sufficient to “just start rambling onto the page, and make any corrections/edits that my current state of knowledge already forces.”
Karnofsky provides so much great detail about his process that I can’t do it justice. So, I do hope you read his article.
The gist of the entire process is a good way to close this post, and I concur. Reading is so important, but by writing enforces deeper thought and better learning.
I’ll write more about these challenges in a future post. I definitely recommend reading as a superior leisure activity, but for me at least, writing-centric work seems better for learning.
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