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  "note": "One of the reasons I focus on writing better is to help me think clearer. Writing is thinking, and the act of writing refines and clarifies your thoughts and ideas.\n\n> Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them.\n\nI have had ideas that swirl around in my head and then when I attempt to write them down they fall apart. In truth it was a collection of vignettes that I thought connected together but refused to when attempting to write it out.\n\n> The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.\n\nGraham was going down a path that I had been down myself before but when he flipped it, showed the corollary, that was a \"oh, wow\" moment. If you believe the former, you must believe the later. It isn't a new statement, just an inverse of the accepted point above. \n\nI want to extend this a bit to highlight two things:\n\n1. Tweets and social media comments are not writing. \n2. Bullet lists of utterances and assertions is not writing.\n\nThe trick with writing is creating the mental image, the full context, of the thing that you are writing about. Bullets allow you to simply state points but lazily skip the work of making it a complete thought. Tweets are even worse, as if they are a single, hanging bullet without context, intent, or insight.\n\n\n",
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