The Relationship between Thinking and Writing

The relationship between thinking and writing, we are often told, is simple: clarity of expression flows from clarity of thought. But because clear thinking is, for many of us, something worked at rather than a natural resting state, the flow of thoughts into words often looks less like a deep and swift river and more like a creek strewn with obstacles that divert the water this way and that and that sometimes staunch the flow altogether. The “clear thinking leads to clear writing” formula suggests that to clean up this mess we need to focus on our thoughts rather than our words. 

But the relationship between clarity of thinking and clarity of writing actually flows in both directions. By attending to our words, we are clarifying our thoughts. The reverse outlining technique shows how working to improve clarity of expression also improves clarity of thought. The same is true of working on word choice and sentence construction. This is not to suggest that there aren’t ways outside of writing to improve clarity of thinking. There are, but that is a topic for another day. 

Some people disagree with the premise that clarity of expression should be a writer’s chief ambition. They argue that complexity of thinking requires complexity of expression. Bryan Garner debunks this argument in his incomparable Garner’s Modern English Usage. After quoting Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell on the importance of plain expression—two people whose complexity of thinking few would dispute—Garner offers two warnings and an inducement:

1) “those who write in a difficult, laborious style risk being unclear not only to other readers but also to themselves”

2) “obscure writing wastes readers’ time—a great deal of it”

3) “simplifying is a higher intellectual attainment than complexifying…the hallmark of all the greatest stylists is precisely that they have taken difficult ideas and expressed them as simply as possible. No nonprofessional could do it, and most specialists can’t do it. Only extraordinary minds are capable of the task.” [1]

Garner’s first two points underscore the real and related risk that writers of complex prose run. As William Zinsser notes in On Writing Well, if readers cannot understand what the writer is trying to say and/or feel that the writer is wasting their time, they will stop reading. The writer might think that the reader is the loser in this situation, but it is the other way around. Even writers uninterested in what readers make of their work cannot easily dismiss the challenge that Garner issues in his third point, and it is this point that I like best. We are kidding ourselves if we believe that we understand that which we cannot explain clearly. Clarity of thought is often the happy byproduct of clarity of expression, and it is to both that we should labor.

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[1] Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern English Usage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 697-698.

Decluttering Your Writing

Countless wise writers advise against focusing too closely on your words and sentences in the initial drafting stage for the simple reason that over-focus on the prose can prevent you from completing a first draft. Many people have had the experience of writing the first sentence on a blank document only to delete and rewrite it over and over again. An hour might pass, and with it whatever energy or enthusiasm you brought to that day’s work. Let the words and sentences flow, secure in the knowledge that you will improve them later. 

After completing a first draft and structural revisions using a technique like reverse outlining, it is time to begin focusing on the prose itself. This usually involves quite a lot of pruning. With a cutting room floor beneath you to catch the falling material, this process needn’t be feared.

“Omit needless words,” Cornell University English Professor William Strunk, Jr. told his students in his 1918 The Elements of Style. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”⁠ 

George Orwell echoed this advice in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” advising that “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”⁠ William Zinsser and John McPhee provide actionable advice alongside similar admonitions. In the chapter on “Clutter” in his essential On Writing Well, Zinsser suggests that you read through your draft and place brackets around everything—words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs—that isn’t “doing useful work.” Placing brackets around clutter rather than crossing it out or deleting it on the spot provides the same sort of helpful psychological safety as the cutting room floor: there is less agonizing because you can rescue the material later if necessary. Read the piece again with the clutter removed. Has anything been lost? For me, the answer is almost always no. But every now and then I will restore a piece of clutter—usually rewritten—to the text. 

Let’s use the first paragraph of this post as example of how Zinsser’s technique works. Underlined words are additions that do the work of the longer bracketed clutter phrases they replace: 

[Countless] wise writers advise against [focusing too closely on] obsessing over your words and sentences in the initial drafting stage [for the simple reason that] because over-focus on the prose can prevent [you from completing] completion of a first draft. Many people have had the experience of writing the first sentence on a blank document only to delete and rewrite it over and over again. An hour might pass, and with it whatever energy [or enthusiasm] you brought to that day’s work. Let the words and sentences flow, secure in the knowledge that you will improve them later. 

“Countless” and “or enthusiasm” might stay even though they are not strictly necessary. The piece reads better, to my eye, with the other bracketed bits of clutter replaced. Zinsser’s decluttering exercise will transform most people’s writing. Some pieces even benefit from multiple rounds of decluttering. I find the technique tremendously helpful for my own writing and when helping others with theirs. 

But there is one final exercise that can take a piece of writing to another level of clarity. In his delightful piece on “Omission” in the New Yorker, John McPhee describes the “greening” process he learned working at Time early in his career. After submitting a finished article, the layout people would return galley proofs to the author with instructions to use a green pencil to cut a certain number of lines to make the piece fit in the space available in the magazine: “Green 3,” “Green 7,” and so on. McPhee came to understand that “greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your ‘finished’ piece, to see what could be left out.” He found the exercise so painfully useful that he inflicted it on decades of his students. Even the tightest piece of writing often can be trimmed still more without losing clarity. If you have a little more time before a piece has to be submitted, directing yourself to “Green 10%” of the words can produce a clarifying final polish. 

The Cutting Room Floor

When successful writers offer advice about the revision process, often they urge that you “kill your darlings”—in other words, cut even the sentences you like best if they are not necessary. This can be difficult advice to take, and agonizing over the death of phrases long toiled over can make the revision process both longer and more painful than necessary. 

My unoriginal solution to this problem is to create a document I call the “cutting room floor.” While revising, the cutting room floor collects all the sentences and paragraphs and entire sections that are not doing useful work in the piece of writing. This makes the process of removal and revision much faster. The reason, I think, has to do with psychological safety. The extraneous material disappears from the piece of writing, but—unlike deleted text—can be restored later. 

An additional benefit to the cutting room floor is that, especially with longer writing projects, it can be mined for material to use in shorter pieces. The paragraph or section based on a particularly interesting but tangential research finding that you tried to shoehorn into the book manuscript deserves its own article anyway. 

The Power of Reverse Outlining

You’ve taken Anne Lamott’s sage advice and written a “shitty first draft”—a big and essential step in the development of any piece of writing. But what do you do next? How do you translate that first draft into a stronger second draft?

Consider reverse outlining. Rachel Cayley provides a clear and helpful guide to get started with this powerful technique. When I was revising my dissertation, reverse outlining enabled me to revise a chapter a week—much more quickly than I thought possible. It is the closest thing to a silver bullet I have found as a writer.

When I am reverse outlining, I have the text I am revising open in a Scrivener window on one screen and a blank document open in another Scrivener window on a second screen. If the text is a complete mess, then I follow Rachel Cayley’s instructions pretty closely. Otherwise, I work through the text paragraph by paragraph, supplying a summary sentence for each paragraph. Quite often these sentences become new topic sentences for the paragraphs in the revised text. I simply copy these new sentences over to the text and continue along. It is astonishing how quickly you can improve the clarity of your paragraphs working this way. With the point of each paragraph clearly stated, I then go back and see how those topic sentences flow in outline form. I move things around as necessary, fill any gaps, and that’s it—a big step towards Draft #2.

Strategies for Producing a First Draft

Everyone knows that you have to have a first draft before you can have a final draft, but sometimes producing the first draft can be an excruciating experience—so much so that sometimes the first draft never emerges. What can you do to make producing the first draft easier?

In her hilarious and insightful book Bird by Bird, the wise Anne Lamott offers two pieces of advice: 

1) Give yourself short assignments

2) Give yourself permission to write what she calls “really, really shitty first drafts.” 

These are priceless suggestions that I modify only slightly by changing the order and lowering the bar still further: I suggest giving yourself permission to write shitty first drafts of very short assignments. And don’t force yourself to start at what you think will be the beginning of your piece. 

If you are writing nonfiction, then a very short assignment might be to analyze a single source. Three or four sentences later, you have a paragraph—and, more importantly, momentum to keep going. If you are writing fiction, you might try to write a single moment that will snowball into a scene. Before you know it, you will have hit your daily writing target—something many writers, including me, find helpful. In his On Writing, Stephen King suggests aiming for a thousand words a day. I’ve found that to be a good, sustainable target when working on a longer article or book. For me, the satisfaction of hitting the target is no less in the third month of working on a project than in the earliest days. 

Now, you can give yourself permission to write shitty first drafts of very short assignments and you can set and hit a daily writing target—but that still might not be enough to get you to a full first draft. In my experience, nothing lights a fire underneath you like having a weekly deadline and someone (or a group) holding you accountable to meet it. In a New Yorker profile by Hilton Als, Toni Morrison recalls participating in a weekly writing group when she was first starting out in which “The only rule was that you had to bring something to read every week." I love the forcing function that participating in a weekly writing group provides. The weekly feedback and—if you pick the right people—encouragement is just as valuable. And if you are sharing pieces of a developing whole, you’ll have readers invested in your finishing. 

None of these strategies work optimally unless you eliminate every barrier to getting words and ideas out of your brain and onto paper (or the screen). The strategies here fall into two categories: eliminating distractions and ensuring you have the ability to capture thoughts whenever and wherever they emerge. 

There are physical and mental components to distraction. The physical ones often can be solved rather easily—a quiet room, a closed door. The mental distractions become more vexing with each passing month. To clear mental space, I do not check email or the news or anything else before beginning to write, turn off all notifications on my work computer, silence my phone and leave it in a different room, and use firewall rules to add friction to my ability to use the internet for anything other than work-related research. This might sound extreme, or impossible. But even the most overextended writer I know—three kids, demanding job with long hours, parents to care for, and more—can do it, albeit in the small hours of the morning. It is a privilege to be able to clear mental space, but we often have more agency and ability to do it than we realize. 

To capture thoughts whenever or wherever they emerge, I keep an iPad with a keyboard case in the kitchen, a steno book and pen next to my bed, a small white board in the shower, and I sometimes even dictate into my phone like a lunatic when I am out on bike rides (only on closed roads or trails). Basically, if a semi-coherent thought enters my brain, I try to get it down as quickly as possible. Don’t take for granted that thoughts will reappear at a more opportune moment.

I am sure there are people who don’t need any of these strategies to produce a first draft in a timely manner. But for the rest of us, or at least for me, these strategies are essential.