WRITING AND SPEAKING.

There are three stages to having something to say: thinking it, speaking it, writing it down.

Often you can think something but when you try to put it into words you can’t do it.

(It reminds me of a scene from some old cartoon I once saw where a writer, pacing up and down his room, comes up with a good idea and a light bulb appears above his head to signify this. But, as soon as he sits down at the typewriter to write down the idea, the light bulb goes out and he can't write anything down.)

Sometimes it seems as inside the head the thinker is a different person to the one who puts the thoughts into words.

Question: before I articulate into words what I mean, where is that thought?

I find it helps to walk around while I am putting together the ideas, verbally, in my head. Then I sit down and just write it down. I need to avoid trying to think and write at the same time.

The difference between speaking and writing is probably due to the fact that writing needs to be more formal. So it is a more difficult thing to express your thoughts like that. When you write you have to be more exact than when you speak. In spoken language you don't have to be exact and grammatically correct. When I write the same way I talk then that makes writing easier.

Written language is more formal, for example business letters. What if it was literally a different language? Suppose you only ever thought in French and only ever wrote in English. (And you were more fluent in French than English.) What if there was a language which was only written which was not ever spoken at all.

Speaking is easier because it is closer to thinking than writing is. (Not (just) in the obvious sense that the mouth is nearer to the brain than the hand moving the pen (or pressing the keyboard keys) is.) Verbal words are movable about in the same way that thoughts are. In writing the ideas are put on a page and so are pinned down. In your head and in speech they have got more room to move around and connect with each other in a natural way. (This is why being able to use cut and paste on a computer makes writing easier than writing on paper.) It’s more difficult to think and write at the same time than it is to think and talk at the same time. The best way to write is to get it all done in your head verbally first (as if you were going to explain it by speaking it) and then write it down.