Writing is Thinking

It is often said that you don’t truly understand something until you have to explain it to someone else. This is true, I think, for two reasons. The first is simply self-awareness. Clearly, it is difficult to understand what you don’t know, and it is difficult to be aware of your own level of ignorance until your “student” asks a question that you cannot even begin to answer. This self-awareness is generated not only by the inquiries of others, but through your own preparation. Planning for a presentation, anticipating the questions that others will ask and preparing to answer them in a way that they will understand requires you to automatically focus your own studying on the most confusing parts of the material.

The more fundamental reason that true understanding comes through teaching is that you cannot fully understand an idea until you can fully articulate it. Indeed, the articulation of thoughts is the only process by which thoughts are actually completed. Stuck in your head, the concepts you grapple with and the conclusions you come to, along with the intervening analysis, is loose and sloppy and incomplete. To expose these thoughts to the real world, to draw them out and have them stand on their own requires much refinement and supporting elaboration, a process that doesn’t occur without the necessity for it, such as when the thoughts are allowed to remain in your mind.

We think that we know what we think. But, in fact, we really only think the first part of our thoughts. The rest is left incomplete. We don’t realize this until we need to complete the thought. We don’t realize that we never finish our thoughts in our own head until the thought leaves our head. To complete every thought would be too cumbersome, too time-consuming. And, for most thoughts, completion isn’t necessary. It’s much easier for us to let the thought trail off into a general assumption that we know what we think. We do this for all of our thoughts; in the safety and comfort of our own minds, we never bother completing them.

Consider, for example, a mathematical proof. We are, all of us, capable of amazing mathematical calculations in our heads. These calculations seem simple, fast, even obvious. But, when required by our geometry teachers to write out every step of the process that led from the problem presented to us to our offered solution, it becomes clear that quite a bit of thinking went into forming our answer. We don’t realize this when doing the math in our heads because our brain speeds through the intervening steps; it barely begins a thought before moving onto the next one. Again, the full articulation of one’s thinking process is not always necessary. But, as I’m sure your math teachers have explained, the mathematical proof is inquantifiably more defensible and respected than a simple assertion that the answer is X. Moreover, if there is an error in your thinking, only the proof can reveal the mistake; the formless mass of your mental processes is not subject to critical evaluation. But mathematical proofs are useful for more than comparing your answer with a colleague’s. They’re important because it is only by writing out the proof that you become aware of the thinking that actually went into your intuition. We know a line is crooked because we know what’s straight. But it’s not until you are forced to explain yourself that you come to understand what straight really is.

This is why I stress the importance of writing. Writing is thinking. There will be opportunities during this program to present your findings and teach others what you have learned. These will be opportunities to solidify your own understanding of the problem you face, the information you find, and the solution you come to. However, you shouldn’t wait for such a moment. Playing with your problem, recording your findings, and crafting a solution, when done through writing, requires you to fully articulate your thinking on the topic and forces you to understand what you’re saying just as effectively as teaching the material to another person would. 

This project is about thinking and, more specifically, developing your thinking faculties. The best way to do this is to write. A certain number of journals will be required of you; there’s no need to limit yourself to that number. Every piece of writing you do will help your thinking progress and reinforce your understanding of what you’re learning. Moreover, you will be able to discover things and develop your ideas in ways that wouldn’t be possible if your thoughts were contained in the formless soup of your cranium. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve actually realized (learned) something about a topic while writing about it. Actually, I can: every time. Writing is the greatest tool available to you in your studies, and you will be amazed at what a tool it can be.