Some people seem to believe that ‘think before you write’ means that you need to through a long process to write something. Nothing of the sort is necessary. Thinking before you write is about engaging your mind before you start moving your hands. It helps to think out the process, but the whole thing can be done in minutes.

There are some people I’ve met who are good enough to write and think at the same time, but I’m not that good. I need to put my thoughts in order or I start going off on tangents as I write. If I want to COMMUNICATE, then I want to be clear. To be clear, I need to think about WHAT I want to say and HOW I need to say it.

I can do this quickly when I’m writing something short. This morning while replying to an email, I read the original email, spent a few minutes thinking about my response, then wrote it. I re-read it to make sure I said what I’d intended, fixed a few awkward phrasings, and sent it off. My reply was a few lines and everything was done in just a few minutes, that’s all.

Once it gets important to make your point clear, or the point is more involved, or there is more than one point … you need to take more time. This is where my journal comes in.

My Journal

I keep a notebook with me all the time and use it for note taking, thinking, journaling, and more. I’ve been doing that since the 1960s, so I have quite a collection of notes. I started using notebooks for classes at university, but when I left, I kept using them for notes in meetings, notes from books, for thinking and planning, drawing, and even just to do lists. it’s my ‘rough draft’ location for most things.

When I need to really make my ideas clear, I work through aan informal process like this:

1. I pull out my journal and start a mind map with the core idea in the center of the page. If I think it’s going to be a big idea, I’ll put it in the center of a two page spread.
2. I fill in everything I know about the subject, expanding as I need to and linking ideas one to another
3. With my knowledge dumped on the page, I use the map to determine what I still don’t know, what holes need to be filled in, and what questions other people might ask about the subject
4. If there are any questions that appear important or holes that I need to understand, then I’ll do any additional research necessary to fill in the map
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 if necessary, but usually I don’t need to
6. I’ll convert the map into an outline by the simple expedient of numbering the major points in the order I want to deal with them. I might actually type this outline into my Word Processor to give me a place to start my written draft. If the map is for a presentation, then this will be the outline of the presentation.
7. Now I can draft what I want to say, raising and answering questions or whatever is necessary to get my point across.
8. A critical step: Put the draft away for a period of time. It might be an hour, it might be a day. What I want to do is be able to come back and re-read it with a fresh perspective as if I’m reading it for the first time.
9. Now I’ll edit the draft, correcting problems I found in re-reading it. These might be grammar, spelling, phrasing, or even rewriting a section to eliminate anything that isn’t clear
10. Repeat 7-9 as much as necessary
11. Publish it

Sounds pretty complex right? Well it’s not. For something short that I know well, Steps 1-6 take just a few minutes and everything is in the journal. Steps 7-10 may take only as long as I need to write it. For something really important, I might delay a day between draft and edit to clear my mind and be able to see what I’m writing more clearly. For something like a BLOG post, I might come back to it after getting a cup of tea or coffee.

How much time it takes to write something depends on how important it is to write it, but even something simple should get some thought before you write it.

Categories: The Basics, The process
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It’s popular these days to push the idea, especially on blogs, that writing directly is somehow more authentic, more real. I don’t believe that. I do write a lot of my stuff directly, but only after spending some time thinking about it. Thinking only while you’re writing is not the way to get your point across.

Let’s step back for a second and think about what our writing is about, it’s about communication. If we want to get someone else to understand us, we need to organize our thoughts so they can understand them. Unless you’ve put some thought into them, your thoughts are likely to be disorganized. That may be ‘authentic’, but it’s not understandable.

Categories: The Basics
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