Why write?

From the moment I read my very first book as an eager 14-year-old, to the most recent literature I’ve consumed, a singular piece of wisdom has been consistently echoed by developers, engineers, designers, project managers, and entrepreneurs alike: the act of writing makes you a better thinker.

Great writers are great thinkers

As two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough said:

writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.

It’s through writing that we exercise our ability to think; they’re not mutually exclusive tasks. Great writing requires observation, reflection, analysis, and an artful presentation of information, in addition to selecting information in the editing process. Critical thinking is the discipline of “actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing . . . information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

As it trains how you think, it inadvertedly trains how you learn. This is something known as the sponge effect; the ability to teach and distribute knowledge is at least as important as the skill to absorb it. Through carefull articulation of our thoughtprocess, it might reveal gaps in our knowledge. To explain - or write - something well you got to have greater understanding of what you are trying to learn as a prerequisite.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. - Albert Einstein.

Thats why I write.