Putting Ideas into Words⁠↗

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought.

The real test is reading what you’ve written. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what’s in your head, only what you wrote. When he reads what you wrote, does it seem correct? Does it seem complete? If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad. It takes me many cycles before I can get an essay past the stranger. But the stranger is rational, so you always can, if you ask him what he needs.

Can you ever know so much that you wouldn’t learn more from trying to explain what you know? I don’t think so.

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.