So you thought you’ve figured out an idea. You’ve even explained it to friends multiple times, and the logic seems solid. But when you actually sit down to write, you discover the idea isn’t nearly as complete as you thought.

I just read Paul Graham’s “Putting Ideas into Words”, and one point struck me. He said: if you haven’t organized the ideas in your head into words via writing, then you don’t have a truly complete idea. Even if you’ve thought about it for a long time, even if you’ve explained it to others many times, as long as you haven’t written it down, the idea remains half-formed.

I think there are three reasons.

1/ Writing exposes gaps in thinking

The reason is simple: writing is a much stricter test than thinking or speaking.

When you’re thinking, you can skip many steps and use “it’s obvious” to cover logical gaps (“you know what I mean, right?”). When speaking, you can use tone, pauses, and gestures to compensate for unclear expressions.

But writing doesn’t allow that. Writing exposes everything that’s vague, disconnected, or unclear. You must explicitly write out every causal relationship, every logical jump, every assumption, or else readers (including yourself) won’t understand.

2/ Writing generates new ideas

(This one can actually makes writing quite fun)

Writing doesn’t just test the rigor of your thinking - more importantly, you can create new ideas through writing.

Paul Graham says half of his ideas were generated during the writing process, not thought up beforehand.

This is because, at least I believe, writing activates a different mode of thinking.

I asked Perplexity to find evidence for this. For anyone interested, you can take a look at this paper. Writing indeed activates a different mode of thinking than speaking. Therefore, what we write may not be the same as what we say.

Ha, science-backed.

When you pull ideas out of your head, break them down into atoms and bits, and reassemble them from ground up, you’re forced to examine and critique them from different angles. This process reveals connections, contradictions, and possibilities you never noticed before.

Writing makes you shatter that fuzzy train of thought in your mind, break it down into atomic ideas, then use your hands, paper, and pen to reassemble them into new forms. This process of deconstruction and reconstruction brings entirely new understanding. I’ve experienced this deeply myself.

3/ Writing refines and polishes

Finally, writing has a characteristic that speaking doesn’t: reversibility. While putting ideas into words doesn’t necessarily require writing—you could absolutely do it through speaking or teaching—speaking is linear and one-time. If you say something wrong, you can only start over. You’ll find that to clearly explain something, you might waste enormous time repeating and correcting, wasting both your time and your listener’s time.

Writing is different.

You can revise, cut, and reorganize repeatedly until you distill the idea to its most precise state. Paul Graham says he spends two weeks writing an essay and reads it 50 times. Writing is a continuous refinement process, and simplicity is the ultimate sophistication—this polishing process forces you to continually purify your ideas, remove the noise, and keep the core.

In this world obsessed with speed and efficiency, everyone wants to use AI to generate text or voice input (I feel guilty about this because I developed an AI voice dictation app myself 🤣).

But fast is slow, and slow is fast. Doing non-consensus things, counter-intuitive things (like writing ✏️), might make us walk slower at first, but in the long run we’ll run farther, faster, and more sustainably than others.