Writing is how I find out whether I understand
💎CORE ARGUMENT
I can hold an opinion for months without knowing whether I understand it. Speaking does not expose the gap. In conversation I can gesture, the other person nods, and we both supply the missing step. A page will not nod.
Bacon divided it into three: reading fills a person, talk makes them quick, and writing makes them exact. Exact is the word I keep. Writing does not make me cleverer or better informed. It shows me precisely where the argument stops and the confidence carries on without it.
The mechanism is that a sentence has to commit. To write the launch should slip because the test failed I have to decide what because is doing there. Failed at what volume? Compared with what? What would have had to be true for me to say go? Each of those is a question my head had been stepping around.
The night of 12 February is my best case. I had recommended the slip at 15:00 on something close to instinct. I was right, as it turned out, but I did not know why until I wrote the memo. Three paragraphs in I found that half my reasons were one reason said twice, and that the strongest argument was one I had not made in the room at all.
So I treat a draft as a test. If the paragraph will not come, the thinking is unfinished, and no amount of rearranging my notes will finish it.
This supports 💎 Clutter is a failure of thinking before it is a failure of style, which is the same claim read off the finished page, and it is the reason 💎 A note is finished when it can be read without its source works as a standard. It breaks down for anything I know with my hands. I can cook the leeks properly and could not write a correct paragraph about why.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
- Before a decision meeting I write the recommendation as one paragraph. If I cannot, I say so in the meeting.
- A stuck draft sends me back to the thinking. It no longer sends me to the tool.
- I ask Sam for the written version first. It is quicker for both of us.
Where I saw it: 📝 Issue 35 - What a launch teaches that a plan cannot · 📜 Use this system for ninety days without changing it · ♦️ Writing clearly
☑️NEXT STEPS
- Write the one-paragraph recommendation before every go or no-go
- Keep the kitchen-table 300 words on mornings after a bad night
- Ask Noor whether her question each fortnight lands where the draft was hardest
📖 Bacon on studies: the three verbs, and exactness as the one that belongs to writing. 📖 Zinsser on clutter: an unclear sentence usually comes from an unclear thought.
💎 Clutter is a failure of thinking before it is a failure of style diagnoses the same failure from the reader's side. 💎 A note is finished when it can be read without its source is this test applied to a single note.
A thought in the head can stay vague indefinitely because nothing forces its parts to connect. A written sentence must commit to a subject, a verb and a because. Where I cannot supply one, I have found the hole. The difficulty of the writing tells me where the understanding ends.
💎 Good enough is a rational stopping rule. Writing until I am exact has no natural stopping point, and an exact memo delivered after the decision is worth less than a rough one before it. On 12 February the recommendation had to come at 15:00 and the understanding arrived at midnight. The order was wrong and I would do it again.
Held as a belief in 🧠 I do not know what I think until I have written it. Practised, about three days in five, as 🔹 Write 300 words.