Is Your Problem Thinking or Writing?
Understanding What is Holding You Back
Ifyou are a parent like me, then you have a lot of challenges. There is not a day that goes by that my daughter does not offer up some kind of challenge like writing on the wall or spilling her entire dinner on the floor. Add on top of that the usual stress of household chores and maintenance, and you have the perfect recipe for a rough week.
Most of these challenges are physical in nature. Cleaning up messes, running to the store, and yard work all take a toll on the body. You literally feel these challenges with every move that you make. As a consequence, our solutions to these challenges are often physical as well. We consume coffee and energy drinks, exercise, and take ice baths to help our bodies cope with all that we demand of it.
As a philosopher, my challenges at work tend to be more intellectual in nature. Analyzing arguments, clarifying concepts, and coming up with counterexamples are less physical, but still somehow hit me just as hard. One intellectual challenge that I know you all can relate to is writing. The challenge of producing clear effective writing, regardless of genre, can take a mental toll on anyone.
What makes writing challenges special is that they often arise from unclear thinking, rather than from struggles with writing itself. For example, the common phenomenon of writer’s block is hotly debated as to whether it is a block of writing or of thinking. When working on a paper, it is often hard to tell the reason for not being able to write is because I don’t know how to express my idea or if I have no idea at all.
Thankfully there are some ways to figure out what is behind our writing problems. Here, I will share with you what I have discovered from years of thinking and writing for a living. I hope that by passing on such knowledge you can better solve the intellectual problems that plague you as much as they have helped me.
Thinking Problems
It is best to first address thinking problems. Thinking problems involve unclear or incomplete ideas and arguments. Thus, even if you are a master of the written word, you will have trouble writing if you do not have a clear idea what you are writing about.
First ideas can be unclear for a number of reasons. I usually find that my ideas are unclear because I have simply not given them enough consideration. I had a spark of inspiration to write a paper, let’s say about my experience giving a presentation in another language, but that’s all I have. In this case, there is so much I could write about that sitting down to actually write feels impossible. How do you drink from a firehose? You don’t.
Thinking problems also present a challenge even after you have a clear idea of what you want to write about. Other signs of thinking problems include an unclear thesis, weak logical connections, or trouble finding relevant evidence or examples—all of which can stop your writing dead in its tracks.
For example, let’s say that you have a clear idea and managed to escape the dreaded blank page by writing a bit about your topic but then get stuck a few paragraphs in. It’s like you know where you want to go but not exactly how to get there. Should the next part be an example? A quote? Again, this is not a writing problem simply because you can’t write anything, it’s a thinking problem.
Another way that thinking problems present in writing is writing too much. Many students who are good writers butunskilled thinkerstend to throw everything they have at the page and hope the reader will be ableto sort it all out.In this case,thesheer volumeof writing shows that the ideas are not clear.Going back to an earlier metaphor, this is like knowing you can’t drink from a firehose and instead of trying, simply letting all the water rush out, flooding the street.
The best way to tell if your problem is an intellectual problem is, believe it or not, writer’s block. When I have a clear idea and know how all the pieces go together in my argument, I have no problem writing about it. In graduate school, I tended to overly outline and plan my papers because it helped me have a clear thesis and direction for the paper. The result was that when I actually sat down to write my papers, it was relatively fast and painless. I knew what I wanted to say and what I needed to say in order for that message to be clear.
Even with clear thinking, writing rarely feelsfrictionless. That’s because not all problems are intellectual. Some are purely writing problems.
Writing Problems
Writing problems involve the struggle to clearly express ideas or arguments. Unlike thinking problems, which reflect a deeper confusion or contradiction in your ideas, writing problems are about clarity, precision, and form. With writing problems, a blank page is not a scary thing, words are scary.
We all know the feeling of looking at something that we have written in shock and think something like “Did I really write that?” This often leaves us wishing that we had never touched a keyboard. As an editor, I have seen it too many times. An aspiring writer sees all the red ink on their essay and never tries to write again.
Besides looking at our own work with disdain, one of the best ways to tell if your problem is a writing one is if the feedback from your readers is not what you expected. For example, if you wrote an article about the history of ice cream but your readers tell you that they like your paper on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (where the ice cream cone is said to have been invented), then you have a writing problem.
A great test for determining if your problem is a writing problem is to talk through your ideas out loud. If when you present them to a friend or even just to yourself the idea makes sense but not when you read it, then the problem is likely a writing problem. This is because your ability to put your ideas into writing is not up to the task of the ideas that you have. You can say it, but you cannot write it.
Writing problems, then, show up in tone, structure, and surface-level confusion and mistakes. They include things like awkward phrasing, inconsistent style, and run-on sentences. In other words, you might have a good idea, but if that idea is not wrapped up in a nice package, your reader will not be able to understand it.
Philosopher Zachary Seech, in his guide to writing philosophy, gives a good example of this when he talks about formality. He says some writers “sound awkward because they feel that a paper calls for a rather formal kind of expression, but their version of formality obscures rather than clarifies.” This shows that the problem is in expressing their idea in an appropriate way since they are able to clearly express it in a more casual context.
Combination Problems
Of course, your problem might be a mixture of both thinking and writing problems. In fact, this is true for most of us including myself. This is because thinking and writing go hand in hand. Thus, while it is helpful to understand and recognize the difference between thinking and writing problems, we have to address them as two sides of the same coin.
Combo problems often present issues with technically good writing but bad story telling or completing a round of edits only to discover that the paragraph is no longer needed. This can leave writers feeling extra frustrated since it makes them feel like they are trying to juggle chainsaws while balancing spinning plates on their nose.
I really started to notice the connection between the two when I started to work with academics whose native language was not English. As an editor, I would get asked to “check their paper for mistakes” but often found little to none. Each sentence was well written with almost no grammar or spelling mistakes. They even often used punctuation correctly — in stark contrast to their native speaking counterparts.
Thus, their language ability was not the reason their papers were getting rejected by publishers. It was their ideas. The papers often started saying one thing and then never seemed to get around to delivering on that promise. Their sections were often logically out of order. At times, the paper even included multiple ideas thus making it confusing as to what the main point of the paper was.
When I pointed this out to them and worked with them to fix it, there inevitably came a realization that they did not know how to do what I was asking from a writing perspective. In other words, once we cleared up their thinking and laid it all out, they were not able to write in English at that level. We fixed one problem but traded it for another — going from worrying about punctuation to worrying about word choice and style.
The key with combination problems is to realize that you can only fix one thing at a time.It is only after clarifying our idea that we notice our writing is no longer able to convey it properly. Vise Versa, it is only after improving ourword choice and transitions that we realize our argument or story has a major hole in it.This means that we need to create a neverending loop of better thinking and writing, that with each revolution gets us closer to our goal.
Conclusion
I hope this article can be of help in diagnosing your issues in writing, business, or academics. No matter who you are, you can benefit from knowing what is holding your communication back. This knowledge is vital if we are to truly address the problems that we face.
To improve our thinking, we need to ask strategic questions such as "what is my evidence for this?” Such questions allow us to test the limits of our ideas and solidify them in our mind. To improve our writing, we need to get lots of feedback on how well we are expressing our ideas. This means talking with friends and having them read your work as well as reading your paper outload to yourself to make sure it sounds good.
In the end, the real progress comes from working on both in a delicate balancing act. Our communication improves the most when we remove our mental and writing blocks. Thus, the goal isn’t to isolate thinking and writing, but to work back and forth between them with patience. Improvement in one makes improvement in the other possible.
The trick is having the patience to work on these skills in tandem and trust that that over time it will lead to better communication.