“People often assume they know how to write because they know how to speak. There are deep and important connections between spoken and written language, but they’re not the same thing.” (Richard Rhodes, How to Write)
It’s always a clarifying experience for me to write. Fascinating how that works.
Speaking and writing operate in fundamentally different contexts, serve different purposes, and engage different cognitive processes. When we speak, we have immediate feedback from our audience. We can see confusion in someone’s eyes and clarify what we’re saying on the spot. We can use tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures to add layers of meaning. We can pause, backtrack, and reformulate our thoughts in real-time.
Writing, by contrast, is a solitary act of communication across time and space. The writer must anticipate the reader’s needs, questions, and potential misunderstandings without any immediate feedback. Every word must carry its full weight because there’s no opportunity for clarification through tone or gesture.
Consider how we organize information differently in speech versus writing. In conversation, we might circle back to a point several times, approaching it from different angles as we gauge our listener’s understanding. In writing, this same approach would likely confuse readers who expect a more linear, structured presentation of ideas.
Speaking is largely automatic—we think and talk simultaneously, often discovering what we want to say in the process of saying it. Writing, however, requires us to think, plan, draft, revise, and refine. It’s a recursive process that demands we hold multiple considerations in mind: our overall purpose, our specific audience, the clarity of our current sentence, the flow from the previous paragraph, and the setup for what’s coming next.
There is one mode of writing that is very similar to speaking: free writing. In this mode, we discard the more formal steps of formal writing and just get words out of our brain on to the paper or into the computer.
A modification of free writing is brainstorming by speaking into an audio recording, perhaps while we’re on our morning walk. Another might be to use mind mapping tools to help us quickly capture and layout related ideas.
We can extend what we captured in a free writing exercise by sharing it with an LLM and asking for reactions, additional ideas, etc. Made possible by the introduction of chatbots a couple of years ago, these tools can be very helpful – just like interacting with a good friend or work colleague can help us refine our thoughts. Then we can be in a more developed position to more formally write.