Writing down ideas forces your brain to discover what you really think View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Writing down ideas forces your brain to discover what you really think Mind and BehaviorLeadershipCognitive SkillsIntellectual HumilityWriting In an environmental ethics class, I had to write a short essay, 800 to maybe 1,000 words, every week. You had to lay out an argument for “why I think eating meat is unacceptable,” or “GMOs are okay, actually.” There was no right answer; what mattered was the quality of your argument. Professor Simeone, who checked a few boxes for crazy, brilliant academics, was a hard grader.
If you had lazy arguments or didn’t seriously consider the counterarguments to your position, you were greeted with an enormous amount of red ink on your draft. For someone obsessed with grades and maintaining a 4.0, I still remember the B- I got on an essay arguing in favor of eating meat. In the comments, Simeone argued, correctly, that I hadn’t seriously wrestled with the worthwhile counters to my argument.
Fortunately, he also offered rewrites for half the remaining points, and I forced myself to consider that maybe I was not as right as I first thought. With each essay, I softened from my original position as I realized what I didn’t know, where someone had a legitimate case against me, and where I was frankly wrong. The process made me a better thinker.
It’s been years since I took that class. When I talked with my old boss, Stan McChrystal, he told me he’d found the same thing writing _On Character_ decades into a career that included commanding U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. It can be tiresome to sit down with pen and paper.
Or you start typing and notice your posture is truly and utterly poor. My grandmother would be horrified. Orwell likened writing a book to a “long bout of some painful illness.” As Rose Horowitch put it in _The Atlantic,_ writing “is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard.” It instead “exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning.
And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.” But the hard part of anything does something good for your brain. I saw it up close as a Spanish tutor. Someone was trying to recall the word for soldier, _soldado_.
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