Writing as a tool

Writing became a lot more rewarding once it was instrumental to my own thinking and to solving problems.

From elementary school it’s hard to recall situations where I wrote things down on paper because I couldn’t have thought them through without it. When doing math competitions, by contrast, I immediately ran into situations where I just really needed paper.

As a child I didn’t like writing, and I didn’t think I’d write much as an adult. (Incidentally, I was slightly ashamed of this, because I thought of writing as a high-status intellectual activity.) That’s probably explained by the fact that I didn’t feel I got anything out of, say, vacation reports — it was purely about keeping the teacher happy by writing 20 sentences.

I’m of course aware of the argument that you have to practice writing in order to learn it, and possibly I did get something out of writing those much-dreaded vacation reports. But idk, I still didn’t like it.

If practicing writing had been optimized for kids like me, I’d probably have enjoyed, say, communication challenges more: one child is shown a very simple picture (like polygons or stick figures), has to describe it in text, and then another child reads the text and tries to reconstruct the picture.

(Besides enjoying it, I might also have gotten annoyed by other children being so dumb and not getting what I mean and not being able to write clearly — but that, in turn, is entirely in line with the pedagogical goals of the activity.)

And nowadays I write constantly, at high volume. Partly because it’s fun and fulfilling to express my thoughts. And largely because I’m just a lot smarter when I have a writing tool at the caliber of a modern computer at my disposal — when I actually want to think about, say, the specifics of an experimental design, with writing I can do things that I would be just essentially incapable of without.