That’s why you need to keep doing it.

---

Dear Readers,

In graduate school, I spent nearly a year reading (and writing about) 33 of the great works of Western philosophy under the direction of the smartest person I’ve ever known, Dr. Peter Caws.

It was slightly terrifying. Peter was University Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University, a physicist by prior training, and the author of respected works on Jean-Paul Sartre, structuralism, and the philosophy of science. I was an adjunct who taught writing.

Each week, I would read a major philosophical work, write a short paper about it, and meet with him to discuss.

The first work I read under Peter’s direction was Plato’s “Cratylus,” a dialogue about language and truth. The paper I wrote began with what I considered a clear and simple sentence: “Language is the mechanism through which we reveal the truth.”

Peter started our discussion with two questions: “What does it mean to say that language is a ‘mechanism’? And what must ‘truth’ be if we need a ‘mechanism’ to reveal it?”

I had no good answers. I had written the sentence quickly, not anticipating that he would interrogate every single word. For the next hour, he systematically unraveled my argument, pushing me to define my assumptions, clarify my reasoning, and sharpen my words.

At the end of the interrogation, he asked: “So, what do you think is the really important point here?”

I answered with something like this: “What we humans call ‘the truth’ is typically just a useful reduction of a small part of an infinitely complex world. And language is how we shape that reduction and share it with others—or fail to.”

Peter nodded. “Hmm,” he said. “That’s not too bad.”

I took this as high praise from a British philosopher-physicist.

Over the ensuing months, that’s how it went. Peter pushed me to think harder and deeper, to use words more carefully, and to wrestle with ideas I could barely grasp.

Along the way, I realized something important: Writing isn’t just a way to communicate thoughts. It’s a way to strengthen thinking.

The Struggle to Write Is the Struggle to Think

Ask most people to define “writing,” and they’ll tell you it’s the process of putting words down on paper, communicating what you already know. (They’re a bit like me before I met Peter.)

In reality, writing is often how you discover what you don’t know—and so how you learn to think better.

As we move through the world, our minds are full of half-formed thoughts, intuitions, and vague impressions. These flickers and fragments feel solid enough when they’re bouncing around inside our brains. But when we try to pin them down as nouns and verbs, they evaporate.

Writing exposes the gaps, the noise, the assumptions we haven’t yet discovered amid the flickering. It forces us to spell out what we mean for someone else—and so to see our thoughts more clearly ourselves.

No wonder great writers and thinkers, from George Orwell to William Zinsser, have argued that clear writing and clear thinking are inseparable. Zinsser put it bluntly: “Clear writing is clear thinking. If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think clearly.”

That overstates the case, but not by much. Some people think well and still struggle to write. But in many cases, fuzzy writing is a function of unfinished thinking.

Its authors haven’t learned the lesson I took from Peter’s interrogations: Writing isn’t just communication; it’s excavation. It forces you to refine your arguments till they can survive on their own, exposed to bright daylight and the wilds of other people’s minds.

Better Thinking Is Worth the Effort

The struggle to write well is the struggle to think well. And that’s why you need to keep doing it.

As more people offload more of their writing to AI, we each face a choice: Do the hard thinking that clear writing demands, or let your voice—your life experience, your unique and beautiful mind—disappear into an ever-swelling sea of synthetic noise.

If you want to swim, not sink, there’s a tried and true way:

• Write
• Get critical feedback
• Rewrite
• Repeat

If you don’t have a philosopher-physicist handy, don’t worry. You can get the critical feedback you need from a thought partner, an editor, a friend, or even (in a pinch) an AI. Just don’t ask the latter to do the the thinking for you.

Of course, if you need a friendly writer-editor-thought-partner, you also know where to find me.

Best,
Steve