How Writing Leads to Thinking ⇥ historians.org

Lynn Hunt, in a 2010 essay for Perspectives on History:

[…] You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before you write, but eventually, if you work at it hard enough, it will come. Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.

Someone — I am not sure who — surfaced this essay on Bluesky or Mastodon as I was midway through polishing my piece about Liquid Glass. It was motivating, and the part I quoted above perfectly describes how I felt as I was writing it. I distinctly remember writing this paragraph:

Apple justifies these decisions by saying its redesigned interfaces are “bringing greater focus to content”. I do not accept that explanation. Instead of placing tools in a distinct and separated area, they bleed into your document, thus gaining a similar level of importance as the document itself. I have nothing beyond my own experience to back this up. Perhaps Apple has user studies suggesting something different; if it does, I think it should publicly document its research. But, in my experience, the more the interface blends with what I am looking at, the less capable I am of ignoring it. Clarity and structure are sacrificed for the illusion of simplicity offered by a monochromatic haze of an interface.

It was important to me to try and solve Liquid Glass on the terms Apple offered, and the “greater focus” explanation was something that had been stuck in my head since Alan Dye spoke of it at WWDC. I could not think of why it felt wrong, only that it did not sit right with me. But when I started writing this, the “similar level of importance as the document itself” idea came to me out of nowhere and exactly reflects how I feel. It is a far better explanation than anything I had consciously thought about, and I doubt I would have arrived there without writing it down.

Obviously, writing is something that speaks to me, Hunt, and many others. Each person may arrive at thoughts and ideas in different ways. For me, though, any time I am stuck on a problem where writing could play any role, it is most often the tool I use to turn scattered questions into something coherent. I have no authority to give advice, so here is some anyway: next time you are stuck on something — maybe a problem at work, or a question at home — try writing it out.