unseriously serious
Untranslatable: A Cognitive Blueprint
This is a draft. I don’t really know where it’s going yet - it’s still taking shape. What beagn as an exercise to better understand writing and has turned into an exploration of how I form ideas and how my mind works (which is why it feels scattered). But I’m enjoying the process of letting it unravel so won’t try to define it yet.
Second grade English homework was usually a composition exercise. We were given a prompt that was vague enough to connect to most topics and instructed to produce 2 to 3 handwritten pages in the red notebook dedicated to the exercise.
I started school late and I didn’t speak English. While my peers were forming sentences, I was still tracing dotted lines to the shape of letters. My writing was barely legible but by second grade I was producing somewhere between 15 to 30 pages per composition. I wrote how I spoke: in long, rambling sentences, full of and then’s and events that univariately occurred suddenly. My ideas were scattered and incomplete, but the result mirrored the thoughts running through my mind as closely as the tools — pencil and paper — allowed. My writing was unfiltered and unedited but by way of existing on the page what was in my mind was tangible.
I think this is the default way of writing.
I was encouraged to shorten my compositions, proofread, and more reasonably connect ideas to the task at hand. I struggled to follow this guidance, and writing became a rigid chore I disliked.
There’s a lot of advice out there on how to write and lists of prompts to get you started. But I haven’t come across a detailed explanation of the thought process behind writing, which is something I really struggled to understand (and am still grappling with.)
Most advice on the topic of writing is either too vague: “write about what you know,” or it’s conflicting and reads like an instruction manual: “Write an outline,” “Don’t write an outline,” “Start in the middle.” Ironically, the people who publish these articles are unlikely to struggle with writing themselves. If they used to, this is now in their distant memory, so their advice doesn’t resonate with readers still trying to figure out what it’s all about.
This may be a long shot, but rather than offer generic, I feel like it would be more useful to explain my own attempt to arrive at a better understanding of the dissemination of linguistic information. Not all of this will resonate with everyone and that’s not the point.
It would usually be a bad idea to write something that might only partially (or not at all) make sense. But on this occasion, I believe that it’s more useful to veer away from an attempt to accommodate individual differences in service of a less watered-down exploration of the subject. I don’t intend for this to be explicitly useful, but you might find something in here that’s implicitly helpful in connecting some of the dots yourself.
What follows is a personal exploration of the thought process and experiments that I’ve found useful to contextualise my writing practice. I want to figure out how to write. As for the why: that’s up to you. If you think, you have something to write about. Why not see what happens?
I. FEELING
It wasn’t until I took a class on translation in my second to last semester of college that I became less intimidated by the task of writing. Translation is like paint by numbers but for words. You get existing words to play with, removing the pressure of coming up with content from scratch. This simplifies the task to conveying meaning, stripping it from the need to also invent the meaning that is to be conveyed.
To be a good translator, one must understand both the individual definitions of words, and their collective social context in both languages and cultures.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry dedicated The Little Prince, a children’s book, to his best friend Leon Wirth (an adult): Je demande pardon aux enfants d’avoir dédié ce livre à une grande personne. The first instinct is to translate this as “I’d like to apologise to all the children for dedicating this book to an adult.” But Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is sympathetic to the children reading his dedication and uses the term ‘grande personne’ - the children’s term for adult, grown-up - to emphasise this. His word choice makes his apology feel more sincere, reassuring the reader that although he has dedicated the book to an adult it is very much for children too.
This context; that an adult has a best friend, that he has chosen to dedicate his book to this best friend, that he acknowledges the irony of dedicating a children’s book to an adult, and that he asks the children for forgiveness using a term that says: even though I am an adult, and I have dedicated my book to my adult best friend, I still understand you and I see you and this book is still also for you--breathes life into the text.
Translating grande personne as adult flattens the emotional nuance. But a literal translation – big person – misses the mark entirely, since neither adults nor children use this term. The translator must find a way to preserve the author’s intent: to at once convey respect, irony, and affection.
My translation process goes like this: I read the text to arrive at a feeling, then I translate both the content and the feeling into the receiving language and cultural context.[1]
Through the lens of translation, I refined my definition of writing as the act of translating feelings into words. Just as a good translator understands the nuances of both languages and cultures, a good communicator considers the receiver’s context to effectively deliver her message. As a result, the pressure I used to associate with writing (focusing strictly on content) shifted to a more nuanced view of language as a tool for emotional and contextual communication.
Like translation, anecdotes also emerge from feelings: You begin by reflecting on how something feels, then follow that feeling to a more relatable experience that evokes the same emotion. By describing the second experience you give the reader a way to understand the original, less familiar one. If you’re not sure where to begin, it can be helpful to start with a theme e.g. dance, music or nature, and work your way back to the feeling you want to convey.
Cockney rhyming slag offers an inversion of this logic: you begin with language and arrive at phrases that sound alike but differ in meaning. The humour lies in the absurdity that words can sound the same while carrying vastly different meanings. For example, “I’m just popping up the apples and pears to grab me whistle and flute” means “I’m just going upstairs to grab my suit.” Here, “popping” substitutes for “going”, “apples and pears” rhymes with and replaces “stairs,” and “flute” stands in for “suit.” Confusing? It is.
I notice myself translating feelings in other areas of life too. When I try to recall who showed me something, for instance, I often feel the person first. That feeling brings their image to mind, which leads to their name, and finally gives me access to my conscious store of information about them. Usually this process happens seamlessly – faster than I can consciously attach words to it. But sometimes it takes longer, giving me a chance to name the feeling before the memory fully forms. This delay has caught me off guard at times. Because the feeling comes first, it’s detached from the associations I consciously hold. This process: feeling, labelling, remembering, and reflecting, has led me to uncover surprisingly complex truths about how I experience the people in my life.
In her acceptance speech for Songwriter of the Decade, Taylor Swift describes how she uses different “modes” in her writing process, which she labels as Quill Lyrics, Fountain Pen Lyrics, and Glitter Gel Pen Lyrics, each named after the type of pen she imagines using. She explains the emotional tone she channels through each mode to suit different genres. I really like this metaphor. It gives her creative voice a shape and makes the feeling she’s trying to capture more vivid.
II. CONTEXT
Translation. Not just literary. [expand on other types of translation and identifying the purpose of a particular communication before comencing.]
III. ORDER
I used to think that ideas should be arranged in the correct order in your mind before writing them down. I now understand that writing doesn’t work like this because the order in which ideas emerge isn’t always the most effective arrangement for them on the page, and because ideas often emerge during the writing process itself. They bubble up and clarify at different rates. Writing them down clears space for the ones beneath to surface, and for new, previously unformed ones to emerge. Rearranging them into a more impactful sequence makes for a stronger piece to read, but that final order rarely matches the order in which they first came to light.
It's a bit like building a house out of LEGO, except you don’t start with all the pieces. Each time you place one piece, a new piece appears. You keep building with what you have, not yet knowing what’s coming next. Only once enough pieces have arrived can you see the bigger picture. At that point you might realise the house could be better if it were built differently, so you take it apart and rebuild it using the same pieces, but in a new order that makes more sense.
Ideas aren’t very useful if you keep them in your head. Writing makes them tangible. This is doesn’t just benefit the reader, but also yourself. It gives you the ability to play with them.
The act of writing also helps focus your attention on a single topic, forcing you to elaborate on something so that you can come to understand it better. Committing words to the page means you need to follow a more logical line of reasoning than thought alone. Intangible thoughts have the freedom to roam around, and it’s especially difficult to contain them to a singular focus if you’re not used to disciplining your mind.
Sequence is both a means of clarification and a stylistic device applied during the editing process. As a device, it can enable you to communicate ideas more effectively. Effective communication is more memorable and can help the reader relate to what you’re saying.
The first time I noticed the effect of chronological sequence was in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. The book is split into three parts, beginning with the main event. It then flashes back to the events that preceded it, and concludes with the aftermath, tying everything together. I was surprised that this didn’t spoil the ending. It made me realise that stories aren’t just about how they end, but why they end that way. Why things turn out a certain way can be just as compelling as the outcome itself.
When I made my first (and so far, only) TikTok video, I learned that the order of information affects the impact of a message. I wanted to explain how students could use CLEP (the College Level Examination Program) to reduce the cost and time it takes to graduate. I used a PowerPoint presentation and began the video by explaining the background: that you need 120 credits to graduate; that colleges allow transfer credit under certain conditions; and that you can earn those credits through alternative means. I ended with the reveal: CLEP exams. But something felt off. The video was really boring. I realised that, to do justice to the message, I needed to lead with the most impactful point: you can earn 3 college credits by taking a 90-minute, multiple-choice exam for under $100.
It's important to distinguish between when it’s appropriate to build up to a big reveal, and when doing so simply hides the “magic moment” (something you want to avoid.) You can test this like so:
i/ If you content begins with background information, ask: does it feel boring? If yes, try putting the magic moment first. Ask yourself if this is more effective.
ii/ If your content begins with the big reveal, ask: does the message feel annoying or sales-y? If yes, try building up to it instead.
If your big reveal isn’t useful or surprising, it will feel boring or annoying regardless of sequence. In that case, it might verge on clickbait. You may want to reflect on how to contribute more meaningful content to the internet.
I’ve found that overthinking sequence before you’re ready to apply it is unproductive. The order in which we tell stories matters, but that’s not something to worry about in a first draft.
IV. BLENDING
The film Arrival (2015) portrays language as circular — as not having a beginning or end, but functioning as an all-encompassing snapshot of communication. I wish there was a way for humans to communicate like that. It reminds me of how I think about some of the best writing: when content and context become indistinguishable. They exist so deeply inside one another that, in isolation, their meaning changes entirely.
After I finally got around to watching Normal People, I rushed to the shop to buy a copy of the book. Read/watch order aside, I enjoyed it so much that even a single detail that added colour to the characters—anything that didn’t appear in the show—would’ve satisfied me. But as I flicked through the copy, I was shocked to see the author throwing some fundamental grammar rules out the window, most notably forgoing the use of speech marks. I walked out of the shot empty-handed.
A few months later, I found myself at the Museum of Literature in Dublin. In the hallway leading to the gift shop, Irish authors are quoted describing their writing process and relationship to language. Sally Rooney explains, “If you get it right, the reader doesn’t remember the language at all.”
I needed to see what this was about and immediately picked up a copy. What I had mistaken for an unsophisticated writing style was actually an attempt to use language as a means of communication rather than a display of artistic fanfare. I had compared it to the flowery language common in the literature I was familiar with, but I hadn’t considered how effectively a story might be conveyed by shifting the focus from aesthetics to resonance. Rooney’s unconventional language choices may have also made the book more accessible to a previously non-reading audience, though there isn’t any data to support this.
[Books that feel like films. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (2013), Love Story by Erich Segal (1970), Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (2005)]
I started thinking about punctuation--specifically how overusing it might cause unnecessary friction for the reader. I especially took issue with commas. I know. They’re so small. But I felt they were used excessively and impeded the fluency of reading. I even drafted an unfavourably named “Anti-Comma Manifesto.” To make my point, I wanted to write the whole thing without using any commas at all. Needless to say, I was unsuccessful.
“A pause that prompts reflection can just as easily cut the reader out. Worse still, these pauses are fertile ground for the fungus of the English language to grow. Words like however, though, and ultimately take refuge in their crevices. What an awful thing to begin a sentence with ‘however’, let alone an entire paragraph, let alone immediately have to follow it with a comma! If the writer adequately prepares the reader and clearly conveys their stance, it should be unnecessary to use a word like however to clarify that they’re introducing a new position.”
Dramatic, I know.
I went back to the drawing board. Commas aren’t inherently bad. But the inflexibility of grammatical “rules” seems to do a disservice to the nuance of comma use. It’s not that these authors are writing incorrectly—it’s that they’re breathing their (or their characters) personal speech patterns and inclinations into a text. This shouldn’t be restricted by rigid conventions. What I took issue with was not commas themselves, but the reluctance of many writers to break the rules in favour of fluency and voice.
Column McCann puts this better than I ever could. I’ll quote his Punctuation: It’s not a thruway thing (comma) text here:
“It’s not a throwaway thing to tell you the truth. It’s not a throwaway thing, to tell you the truth You see? Punctuation matters. In fact, sometimes it’s the life of death of a sentence. Hyphens. Umlauts. Full stopes. Colons. Semi-colons. Ellipsis. Parentheses. They’re the containers of a sentence. They scaffold your words. Should a writer know her grammar? Yes she should. My husband and me, or my husband and I? Their or they’re or there? Where you at? I’m doing good, thanks. But let’s face it, sometimes grammar can be so damn prescriptive. And the fact of the matter is that our teachers should really remove that grammatical blockage from their arses. Sometimes its’s just too much. Knowing the difference between a main clause and a dependent clause doesn’t really matter, as long as you can intuit the difference. Writers often feel the grammar rather than knowing it. This comes from good reading. If you read enough, the grammar will come. (And you will know exactly why the comma appears in that first sentence). A few words of advice. Don’t overuse the semi-colon; it si a muscular comma when used correctly. Parentheses in fiction draw far too much attention to themselves. Learn how to write the possessive as most good student’s do (oops, sorry). Never finish a sentence with an “at.” Oops, sorry again. Avoid to many ellipsis, especially at the end of a story. When in doubt use descriptive grammar rather than prescriptive. The language of the street eventually becomes the language of the schoolhouse. Gramar changes down through the years, just ask Shakespeare or even the good folks at the New Yorker. Remember that a copy editor will eventually fix your grammar, or at least suggest changes, but you should get it as close to perfect as you can first. But in the end the language matters so much more than the manners the grammar wants to put upon it. Sometimes we write a sentence that isn’t, in fact, correct, but it sings. And the question is: Would you rather be the ornithologist or the bird?”
Gary Provost illustrates this idea in 100 ways to improve your writing through sentence variation:
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. Ivary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.”
Walter Benjamin accomplishes this in The Translator’s Task, using rich description and metaphor to [insert the point he’s making].
In live translation, you can speak over the person who’s talking. This keeps the conversation flowing and removes the need for awkward pauses. It’s also easier for the translator, who doesn’t have to rely as much on memory--unlike consecutive interpretation, where the translator waits until the speaker finishes and must retain entire chunks of speech. Simultaneous translation is often more accurate as a result. It’s like taking notes in class: you don’t wait for the teacher to finish before writing. There’s no reason to wait in a live conversation either. The first time I did this, I felt like I was being rude. Like I was interrupting. But that mindset isn’t helpful. It’s best to let go of that notion entirely.
V. "WRITING HELPS ME THINK CLEARLY"
This is the most common answer I received when I asked people why they write, and I really struggled to understand it. I was both actively skeptical of the idea that writing could clarify thinking and unsure what "thinking clearly" actually meant.
I used to believe that writing and thinking were fundamentally incompatible. I felt that the tools required for writing unnaturally slowed the pace of thought. To me, the only way writing could aid thinking would be if the speed of thought could be calibrated to match the speed at which words become tangible. Because of this mismatch, I thought thinking and writing should be separate undertakings. (This belief was also compounded by my fear that writing would stunt the development of ideas.)
I also believed that structure was a first-draft problem (as mentioned above.) So, on the few occasions I intentionally wrote something, I would draft it by hand and edit as I typed it up. I thought this would make me more thoughtful about word choice and give me more time to arrange ideas in a sequence that had the intended impact. But in reality, I was trying to edit as I wrote, rather than editing after writing. It turns out that it’s very hard to edit something that doesn’t exist. (Writing this way didn’t produce much content.) And trying to write and edit at the same time didn’t refine ideas the way I imagined it would. Instead, everything came out more jumbled: tenses were mixed, tone varied, and ideas felt disjointed. I’d spend ages trying to untangle it.
But the idea of “thinking clearly” really appealed to me. Even though I didn’t understand how writing could help me achieve it, I decided to give it a go in hopes that I might figure it out. Every morning for 30 days, I set a timer for five minutes and tasked myself to simply write something.
But I couldn’t come up with anything to say.
Was this a journaling exercise? That’s what it became, and I now see it wasn’t productive for the kind of “thinking clearly” I was aiming for. Nor was I actually writing about the things I was thinking about.
It wasn’t until later that I realised I’d been writing all along. I just hadn’t recognised it as writing.
I go through what I called “phases,” each one centred on a question or theme I can’t stop thinking about. Some last weeks. Others, years. I gather quotes, run informal surveys, collect bits of data, pester friends with questions, and compile loosely structured notes.
Often, an essay or reflection sat at the centre of each phase, even if I didn’t think of it that way at the time. The writing wasn’t polished, but it was tangible. These phases were essentially personal knowledge archives. I wasn’t completing these explorations as fully as I could have if I had committed myself to elaborating on them. But even in their unfinished state, they contained small discoveries.
I realised this during a long flight spent collecting my notes from the past year and grouping them thematically, resulting in a document titled brain vomit 2024. Reflecting on this while battling a travel-induced bout of sleep deprivation, I could see a coherent picture of the questions I’d been circling and the insights I’d gathered, but never fully developed. Seeing the threads connect across phases made it obvious that the writing had been doing cognitive work all along.
That’s when I finally understood: writing helps you think clearly because it forces you to complete your thoughts. You have to follow your reasoning to its end, even if it’s temporary. You can’t gesture vaguely at a concept, you have to land on something, even if you revise it later. And by training yourself to land, you get better at landing. Over time, your thinking becomes more precise, even outside of writing.
It's a higher-accountability version of the idea: if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well. Writing doesn’t just document clarity, it creates it.
Then I came across Paul Graham’s Putting Ideas Into Words. It would’ve been helpful to have found it earlier.
VI. TOOLS
The tools you use to write don’t just affect how fast you can get words down. They shape how you relate to what you’ve written.
When I used to write entirely by hand, I thought I was encouraging depth and care. But I later realised I was also encouraging perfectionism. Handwriting made every word feel final and too fixed to play with. Even small edits felt clumsy, like rewriting an entire sentence just to adjust the order of a few words. I was too close to the page, both physically and mentally. The slowness I’d hoped would bring clarity instead made me overly cautious.
On the other hand, typing makes writing feel more provisional, inviting change. I don’t feel as precious about what I’ve written when it’s typed which makes it easier to experiment. I’ve learned that writing needs to feel malleable in order to improve, and the right tools can create just enough distance between me and the words to make that possible.
I now try to match the tool to the task. If I’m working on structure, I use a computer, where I can rearrange and cut whole sections. If I want to test whether a paragraph makes sense or whether a sentence is doing too much, I write it out and hack away at it by hand. Seeing the words in a new format, on paper, instead of on the screen, helps me read more critically.
I keep a copy of my first drafts and compare them to my edits to hold myself accountable throughout this process. I ask myself whether I’m making things clearer or just dressing them up. It’s a way of checking whether my edits are actually improving the whole rather than indulging my ego in an attempt to manipulate how I want to be perceived, without actually serving the reader.
You might’ve come across the phrase “write drunk, edit sober.” Draft freely, revise carefully: different tools help you do each well. The ability to choose the appropriate tool can significantly improve your work and reduce the friction of the process of bringing ideas to light.
VII. NOT KNOWING
There’s a particular confusion I often find myself in. It appears before I don’t know something. I can’t even tell what I’m supposed to be trying to know. It sometimes feels like everyone else understands things so intuitively that they can’t fathom requiring an explanation. Meanwhile, I can’t even figure out the right question to ask.
These gaps become obvious when they’re revealed, usually through some inconvenience. I grew up quite sheltered and am aware that I probably have more of these than most people. Over time, I’ve come to recognise three types:
i/ Obvious gaps – where no one thought it needed to be explained.
ii/ Unnoticed gaps – where I don’t even realise there’s a gap. The friction just feels like part of life.
iii/ False gaps – where I overcomplicate something by assuming I’m meant to know how to do it myself, when the usual answer is to outsource a solution.
Most of the clearest examples I can think of come from car maintenance. Cars are a great lens for this because they sit in that strange space between common knowledge and specialised knowledge. Most people use them but we can’t seem to agree on what you’re supposed to just know, what you should be taught, and what you’re expected t outsource. As a result, they’re full of moments where gaps reveal themselves.
Obvious gaps -- When I got my driver’s licence (and car), I had very little experience with vehicle maintenance. I had been to a petrol station only a handful of times and had never been shown how to use a pump. Because I have so many of these gaps, I’m pretty comfortable figuring things out as I go.
The first time I went to a petrol station, I parked and walked over to the pump to begin filling up. But the little door to the fuel tank wouldn’t open. I tried pushing it, assuming it might unclick. It didn’t. I asked someone nearby for help, but they didn’t know either. So, I turned to the internet.
WikiHow advises to: “Check for a fuel tank lever or button near the driver’s side door. Push the gas tank door inward if there is no button or lever. If the gas tank door is stuck shut, engage the manual release lever through the trunk.” Ok, so it’s called a gas tank door. Noted. But none of that solved the problem.
I still had some fuel, so I drove off and tried at another station, thinking maybe a fresh environment might help take my mind off it, I was clearly overthinking it.
This time, the door opened without any problems.
Sometimes it would open. Sometimes it wouldn’t. I couldn’t figure out why, so I treated it like a random glitch. I made sure to never let my tank run too low, just in case.
But I knew it wasn’t actually random. It must be something I was doing. I started by reflecting on the variables I had control over. What could I be doing differently each time I pulled into a petrol station? I ran through the order of my actions and tried adjusting one thing at a time.
Eventually I realised that when I stepped out of the car and locked it, the gas tank door locked too. That was it. The car was working exactly as it should, but the gap was so obvious that even the wikiHow article didn’t think to mention it.
Unnoticed gaps – For a while, I was refilling my tires with air every two weeks. I assumed this was normal and just what happens when you drive a lot. I didn’t think anything of it until I casually mentioned it to someone, and they looked concerned. They told me it definitely wasn’t normal and that something must be wrong with my tires or the electronic sensor that detects tire pressure. That conversation reframed what I thought I understood. I’d been treating an inconvenience like a fact of life, not a problem to be investigated.
False gaps – When my car battery died, I spent hours watching a YouTube video at 0.2x speed on how to replace it. I took apart my cars insides and carefully rearranged them in the same order on the groud. This felt like a small but serious rite of passage I was familiar with: figuring out how to do something “everyone else” seemed to know how to do.
Eventually, I told someone about it. They looked confused and told me I could just go to a garage. People don’t usually replace their own battery.
I hadn’t considered that. I’d treated it as a gap in personal knowledge when it was really just something most people don’t do themselves. There wasn’t a gap. I’d made one up. (But now I know how to replace my own battery. I personally believe that you shouldn’t own things you don’t know how to fix yourself, but that’s a separate point.)
Another time, I was driving away from the petrol station when my car started beeping. I was sure I’d done something wrong while filling up. Maybe I’d left the cap loose or spilled fuel. I waved someone down on the pavement to ask why my car was beeping.
I hadn’t put my seatbelt on.
That’s all it was. But in that moment, I genuinely thought it had something to do with petrol. Because I was in a context in which I was already hyper-aware of what I didn’t know, my mind assumed it had to be complicated. But it wasn’t.
These weren’t gaps, but by assuming they were, I overcomplicated matters for myself.
This kind of thinking feels pre-verbal. You know something’s missing, but you don’t know where the edge of the gap is. I’ve come to see it as a problem of question discovery, not answer discovery.
VIII. FIGURING IT OUT
To work though it, I run little experiments to see what questions shake loose. These are informal formal methods that I find them helpful. Sometimes they lead to better questions. Sometimes just to better noticing.
A few of these experiments:
i/ Mimic someone else. Do what they’re doing without overthinking why they’re doing it. The movement might unlock understanding. This words especially well with physical or embodied practices like yoga or drawing, where the doing teaches you more than explanation. It can also work with writing, coding, or video editing. Like translation, trying to replicate something that already exists can give you a better understanding of how to apply the form to your desired context.
ii/ Stop thinking about it. Let the question sink below the surface by doing something else entirely. The back of your mind will keep working on it. The moment of clarity often arrives when you’ve stopped trying.
iii/ Flip it upside down/take it apart and rearrange it. What if the think you’re trying to understand didn’t exist? What if the opposite were true? If you don’t understand capitalism, try imagining a world without money. If you don’t understand shame, try imagining a culture where nothing is shameful. The contrast might make the function of the thing more visible.
iv/ Change the question type. If you’re stuck on “how?”, try asking “why?”, “what for?”, or “when?” instead. For example, asking how viaducts were built might give you technical information, but asking why they were built tells you more about the priorities and social context of the time period, ultimately allowing you to conclude their purpose and assess their success.
v/ Ask someone when they first noticed it. Ask them when this concept or phenomenon first entered their consciousness. Their answer might uncover the thing you didn’t know how to ask about in the first place. Also, this story is likely to be funny. They probably became aware of it for the same reasons we become aware of most things: by approaching it under some incorrect assumption.
When I was in second grade (what a year for learning how to think!) we were given the task of writing instructions for an alien on how to have a bath. I thought I did a good job until the teacher went around the room pointing out all the obvious steps we’d missed. I forgot to tell him to take his clothes off. I forgot to tell him to turn the faucet off after the bath had filled. The lesson wasn’t really about bathing. It was about how many things feel too obvious to mention until you’re asked to explain them to someone with no frame of reference.
I think about that exercise a lot. It taught me that answers are only part of the equation. Noticing the things other people have stopped needing to explain -- uncovering hidden assumptions and incorporating these clarifications into your communication -- is just as important to being understood.
At the time I thought, what a silly alien! Perhaps maturing is realising I was the silly one all along. I find this perspective more useful. Employing it while learning car maintenance allowed me to take ownership of my lack of knowledge. Though at times I still feel like the alien. At least there are two of us now.
IX. BEGIN WITHIN
This sounds wishy washy but what I mean that it’s easy to reach for answers the moment something doesn’t make sense. Through our phones, we have information available at our fingertips. But I’ve found it’s often more useful and enjoyable to try to figure things out myself first. The conclusion I reach might be incomplete, but it tends to align better with what I’m actually trying to understand when I think through it for myself first.
A lot of advice is too generic to be useful. It feels good in the moment because it looks like an answer. But a lot of the so-called answers, like those in self-help books, are basically just comfort statements. They feel nice because they give you the illusion that your confusion ahs been resolved. But more often they not, they just skim over something you still need to reckon with. Which, inconveniently, only you can really do.
Beginning by trying to figure it out yourself is also a more fun approach to thinking. Let’s say you’re trying to understand why your barbeque isn’t working. You could get the instruction manual out. Or you could look at it. Have a poke around. Twist some levers, see what happens. You’re likely to get a better understanding of the problem this way. Then read the instruction manual to fill in the gaps. The process, of guessing and experimenting, helps you understand the issue more deeply and, importantly, tailors your knowledge acquisition to the problem you’re trying to solve.
You can do this with things you’ll probably never fully understand too, like teleportation. Try figuring it out with what you already know. Build a rough theory. Then look for answers in the individual pieces that make up your own theory, rejigging it around to eventually come to a much better understanding of how teleportation might (or might not) actually work. What you’ll likely end up with isn’t just a better grasp of how something works, but a deeper sense of why it works the way it does.
That’s what I’ve been doing here. I’ve been writing about writing and thinking because I want to understand how I do it. There are plenty of books that might’ve helped, and I’m sure much of what they say would resonate. But it’s more fun to dig into my own mind before referencing these. I’m looking forward to reading John Dewey’s How We Think but I think I’ll get more out of it now that I’ve spent time observing how I think. I’ll be able to compare it to my own observations, be less prone to nodding along when something sounds right, and approach the text in dialogue with the author rather than passively consuming it. It’s been really really tempting though. Writing, rather than just thinking, through my own ideas is one way to hold myself accountable to this approach.
X. READING
I’m a slow reader. My rate of absorbing information is, at best, average. This used to bother me quite a lot.
There’s a wonderful interview where Terry Gross asks Maurice Sendak to share some of her favourite comments from readers. It captures exactly how I felt:
“Oh, there’s so many. Can I give you just one that I really like? It was from a little boy. He sent me a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over. I sent him a postcard and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim, I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
I used to want to eat books. I wanted to be the kind of person who could sit down with a book and emerge two hours later with a complete understanding of something entirely new. But I’m not. And after looking into all the ways to become a “faster” reader, I realised I didn’t really want to be one.
Absorbing everything quickly isn’t the same as absorbing it well. I like books, but I don’t think they’re the only way to learn. You can talk to people, ask them questions, or listen to someone who’s read five books on a topic and just wants to tell you about the one paragraph that changed how they think. Sometimes that’s more useful than reading the book yourself. You get the content and the lens, and the bit that your friend cared about the most, helping you better understand them, too.
And sometimes the most valuable ideas don’t even come from books but from sitting with a small piece of information. I think there’s a lot of value in pondering. Turning things over, testing them against other things I’ve seen or felt or assumed. That process is slow, but it tends to stay with me longer. You don’t need to consume massive amounts of material to have interesting thoughts. Most of the time it’s not the volume of input that matters, but how you let it settle.
Not all answers can be found when you’re looking. Some of the best answers I’ve come across showed up years after the question. You forget you were even looking. Then something reappears and suddenly it clicks. Not because it’s new, but because you are. You’re finally asking the right version of the question, or you’ve dropped the wrong one entirely.
I read to be informed, but I also read to be surprised. Reading to be informed means scanning for structure to pick up on patters and keywords.
If I’m trying to understand how social housing is distributed in U.S. cities, I might skip to the graphs to get the shape of the information and then return to the main article and scan it for key words I’ve identified as useful for understanding things given my interpretation of the shape I’ve just observed.
But reading to be surprised is slower. It means sitting with each paragraph to see what it shakes loose. Sometimes, the text isn’t explicitly giving you an answer but prompting you to reconsider your assumptions. The sentence that surprised you might not be the most explicitly informative one on the page, but it might just land in the right place for you.
Some people are really good at regurgitating information. They skip the part of trying to figure things out for themselves. This isn’t very conducive to deep understanding. Don’t let these people fool you. The key to understanding things begins with being comfortable not knowing. Skipping this step you doesn’t put you in a much better place than where you started. Like this guy, you’ll only end up fooling yourself.
XI. GENDER
Translating gender requires a different kind of attention. There’s a particular responsibility the translator takes on that might be best exemplified by feminist texts. It’s not just about conveying meaning but about capturing power dynamics and other nuances, like agency, embedded in the original language.
To translate gender well you need to understand what the language allows. Aside from cultural and societal norms, that includes unspoken hierarchies and linguistic asymmetries that shape how gender is expressed. Feminist writing often challenges or exposes those norms, but if you don’t recognise the constraints of the original language, you’ll miss where the author is pushing against them.
You also can’t assume that translating into a majority language is neutral. Translation always involves choices, especially when moving between languages with different gender systems. Those choices shape how agency is perceived. Here, the translator’s role is active and interpretive, sometimes even political.
Russian offers a good example. In Russian, when a woman marries a man, the phrase used is: Анастасия выходит замуж за Ивана . Literally, “Anastasia is getting married behind Ivan.” When a man marries a woman, it’s Иван жениться на Анастасию: “Ivan is getting married on Anastasia.” Both get flattened in English to the same neutral phrase: “X is getting married to Y,” where X and Y are interchangeable. But the original constructions encode agency differently. Never mind that the woman goes behind the man, but the man is the grammatical subject of his sentence. The woman is not.
A feminist author could play with these conventions, twisting or reversing them to draw attention to gendered expectations. But English doesn’t give you the tools to replicate this directly. An attempt at a more literal translation like “Anastasia is getting married on Ivan” won’t register as intentional subversion. It’ll just sound wrong.
So, the translator has to choose. But how do you translate that which the receiving language doesn’t make space for? What sacrifices are you willing to make, and what message are you trying to convey?
Expand on this: Table, (fr) table, (ru) stol. Colours. Gendered in Russian? French? English?
XII. WHERE’S THE WRITER?
The writer is just as much a part of the text as the reader. Where she chooses to place herself shapes how the reader engages with the content. It establishes trust, can be a method of disclosing bias, and can signal to the reader the level of discernment they might like to apply to a text.
Some writers make themselves invisible. The benefit of this is that the reader feels in control. They’re free to form opinions without feeling guided by the author’s presence. Third person fiction works this way. In Harry Potter, the narration closely follows Harry’s perspective but J.K. Rowling doesn’t insert herself into the story. Her voice is there, but not in the form of a character.
(it would be weird if J. K. Rowling made a cameo in the Harry Potter books)
The Economist writers as anonymous, hive mind. What’s written is more important than who writes it. (https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/why-are-the-economists-writers-anonymous)
Sometimes the writer’s presence
We know the story is filtered through someone, but it’s a character, not the writer. J.K. Row
The writer is just as much part of the text than the reader. Where the writer situates herself
Bias’ become more difficult to detect. Dangers of the invisible writer/translator. Is there a “right” way?