Writing allows for iterative thinking
Summary
- Writing allows review of your thoughts, over and over again to improve your thinking
Details
- Writing allows to remove trains of thought which are weak or irrelevant
- Writing allows for complex ideas, proofs, examples and precision
- It allows a person to build on previous thoughts and ideas
References
Quotes
Writing allows you to review what you have thought, to retain what you have thought long enough to review it. This process facilitates iterative, constructive thinking. One thought can be added to another—and another and another. Through the magic of editing and revising, writing allows you to insert new thoughts between the old ones or to erase fruitless lines of argument or narrative.
Building complex arguments or stories requires the ability to retain large amounts of information in your mind unless you can delegate the retention to a document, which then makes it available for editing, interpolation, refinement. Writing thus encourages the generation of increasingly complex ideas. Arguments that require separate lines of inquiry, contingent details, proofs, and examples can be layered and rearranged to strengthen the claims. Moreover, it lets the poet change the colors of her palette, even those already on the canvas. As a result, writing permits a level of complexity, precision, and eloquence in communication that is unattainable by word-of-mouth efforts.
Precise formulation enables the thinker to go beyond simple ideas and tackle intricate theories. It allows the mind to solve one problem and, having retained it in writing, turn to another. Individual elements of interrelated problems can be tackled one at a time and then addressed as a whole. Vergil using stub verse as mental props and Quintilian saving space for random thoughts demonstrate solutions to compositional challenges of putting thoughts in order.
Building complex arguments or stories requires the ability to retain large amounts of information in your mind unless you can delegate the retention to a document, which then makes it available for editing, interpolation, refinement. Writing thus encourages the generation of increasingly complex ideas. Arguments that require separate lines of inquiry, contingent details, proofs, and examples can be layered and rearranged to strengthen the claims. Moreover, it lets the poet change the colors of her palette, even those already on the canvas. As a result, writing permits a level of complexity, precision, and eloquence in communication that is unattainable by word-of-mouth efforts.