[1] Short notes on writing.

I'm learning to write more & improve my writing, and these are some of my personal notes. It is a combination of either summarised and compressed version of other resources, or from my thoughts on improving in writing. I noticed that the little pieces of notes started to form a theme so I created this.

---

Why write

Sometimes you don't start because you don't know why you have to. Or sometimes, you stopped doing it because you forget why you started.

Write for mind clarity

You must write to have clearer thoughts.

Dump some things from your brain to give space for other things. Your memory doesn't have much space for all the things that are happening, had happened or is going to happen in your life.

So, writing helps to clear your mind and allow you to think about other problems, commitments, relationships, and other things in your life that needs to be attended to.

Write for better memory access

The second reason to write is to stop relying on your organic store of knowledge.

Writing gives you the ability to see in retrospect the road you've taken, the mountains you've climbed and the abyss you've fallen into.

It gives you secondary but persistent access to your memories that your primary(and short-term) memory could never have because your brain is worse at storing and keeping things stored than computers.

They are also worse at searching than computers. Knowledge is stored in no order but by abstract connections between each other in your brain. In computers they can be ordered, indexed, searched by keywords, tags. Their connections can be visualized in graphs if you write in Obsidian, Rome or other awesome note-taking tools.

This gives you a lot of help when planning, re-reading notes or finding emergent ideas from previous written resources.

How to write

Finding the optimal way to write takes time. Also, you always seem to do bad at it and make it hard for yourself by expecting too much, and being scared of doing too little. And the stress pushed you out.

This is supposed to guide you in writing. It can be used as a framework to practice when writing.

Write 5x more but keep it 5x shorter

Write 5x more but keep it 5x shorter.

Writing makes sure that you understand what you learned or experienced by explaining and describing it. By writing something small and more often, you don't have to beat yourself up because you don't know how to write a long paragraph about something.

Just write a 3-line paragraph, or 2, or even just 1 line. You can then use the combination of the small notes to write a big one that covers their connections and derive meaningful, more abstract knowledge.

This allows you to explain something from its foundational(first principle) components and their relations with each other. In fact, that's how this post came together. Each heading is a small note in a different document from my second brain that got combined.

Imagine telling to someone else

Now when you are writing, don't forget to do this important thing: imagine like you're telling someone else.

Picture explaining or describing to the specific person/group of people. For example, when writing an explanation of how smart contracts work, imagine telling it to your friend that does not know about blockchains. Having a reference of who you're telling to will help you find the balance between being thorough and straightforward when writing.

When you come to any of the writings again, you can be as clueless as someone that never knew about the topic, and still can understand it.