N° 026Planted 2026

Note · draft

On Writing to Understand

Don't forget to use your brain. Your tools don't have to do your thinking for you, that way leads to an atrophied ability to truly understand. And understanding isn't just a stepping stone to getting things done.

It's also a muscle. Hand the work off and it withers. Keep at it and it compounds: the more you understand, the easier it gets to understand more. A lot of that work happens in writing, where putting a thought into words is how you find out whether it holds up.

Put another way: better writing starts with better thinking, and better thinking happens on the page.

Here's Hank Green in the We Are Here Newsletter on 2026-10-16:

I don’t know where we’re heading, but as a science communicator, I want to be clear that investigating the world does not just confer upon us new abilities. I think of our investigations into the world as giving us three great gifts:

1. Knowledge — just knowing /that/ things are.
2. Ability — using the knowledge to allow us to do new stuff.
3. Understanding — actually building a model of how things work.

That third one… I think some people forget it, or they believe that it is only a step we take in order to get to ability. And yes, I’m glad it does that, but also it is a great human drive. And some portion of us should love and celebrate it the way others love and celebrate great achievements in sports or music or literature. The fact that science often does give us new tools with which to affect our world can make it seem like that’s the only reason it exists, but true, deep human understanding that can be passed from person to person is, on its own, a little bit the point.

Robin Sloan in ‘Ask for what you want’ is a key skill for the 21st century:

“Your spaceship”, in this analogy, isn’t only your software, but your mind. Making these apps, I felt my programming muscles wither in realtime, the timelapse of the rotting apple. The idea of writing code by hand now feels … not impossible, but just SO excruciating. That feeling honestly frightens me, and I intend to keep it firewalled into this domain.

Paul Graham in How to Do Great Work:

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more.

from the same essay:

Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

Ted Chiang in Exhalation:

And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements.

Adam Mastroianni in 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing:

lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.

Paths from here