Writing helps you see the flaws in your thinking. This becomes more easy and effective the more you read.
I’ve noticed while writing this blog, my writing has become more concise and focused. But I don’t really edit. Here’s my advice:
Don’t “fix” your writing. When you write, you’ll see flaws in your thinking shining so brightly, but don’t look away! Also, don’t edit your writing to remove all flaws in the thinking behind the writing and the logical flaws. Keep it all there. Instead, aim to improve your thinking.
When you write about a topic, and your thinking is broken, you’ll naturally want to improve your writing on the topic. But you can’t write better than your thinking. So allow your writing to be so terrible and broken and incomplete. Let it be embarrassing. Let the pressure you feel from having your writing be so flawed encourage you to improve your thinking on the matter.
What enables this is if you’re not attached to the way your writing is received by others. If you can handle people not liking your writing, then you can more easily allow it to be so flawed, which gives you the space to improve your thinking.
Another thing that helps is to hold off on writing something until you feel ready to write about it. Don’t start writing about something thinking that you’ll learn everything you need as you write it. That’ll add pressure which will not be productive to your thinking and learning.
This is really only true if you’re writing about things that aren’t so objective. For example, if you’re writing about something subjective like the experience of anger, then pressure will be counterproductive. If you’re writing about how a certain machine works, then the pressure will likely be productive.
I hope that makes sense, I have a strong intuitive sense of this distinction, but I’ve never taught or explained this to anyone before.
The main point here is that since the point of writing is to improve your thinking, if you fix your writing to hide the flaws from your thinking, you won’t improve your thinking.
The Mshary 