Putting Ideas into Words

February 2022

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows
you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas
into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually
wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to
get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but
incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones
you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write
them.

Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you
wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your
ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true.
You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not
just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that
turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.

It's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that
makes writing so exacting. 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. If he's
not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify
some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more
qualifications. Happy now? It may cost you some nice sentences, but
you have to resign yourself to that. You just have to make them as
good as you can and still satisfy the stranger.

This much, I assume, won't be that controversial. I think it will
accord with the experience of anyone who has tried to write about
anything nontrivial. There may exist people whose thoughts are so
perfectly formed that they just flow straight into words. But I've
never known anyone who could do this, and if I met someone who said
they could, it would seem evidence of their limitations rather than
their ability. Indeed, this is a trope in movies: the guy who claims
to have a plan for doing some difficult thing, and who when questioned
further, taps his head and says "It's all up here." Everyone watching
the movie knows what that means. At best the plan is vague and
incomplete. Very likely there's some undiscovered flaw that invalidates
it completely. At best it's a plan for a plan.

In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas
in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example.
And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though
they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till
they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can
express in a formal language. [1