On Writing, Speaking and Thinking

https://www.danielcorin.com/posts/2025/on-writing-speaking-and-thinking

Writing, speaking, and thinking are distinct cognitive activities. Speaking is linear and time-bound—you can’t easily revise or restructure mid-conversation. Writing is nonlinear—you can rearrange, revise, and return later, enabling deeper thought.

Thinking is refining unstructured ideas into coherent concepts. Writing facilitates this by externalizing thoughts into tangible words that can be edited. Writing doesn’t just express pre-formed ideas; it actively transforms them. You emerge with new questions and evolved understanding—writing is thinking.

When people demo coding agents, they struggle switching from speaking (performative, flowing) to writing (deliberate, self-critical) because these activities use different cognitive resources.

When struggling with AI prompts, the issue is usually unclear thinking. Writing forces you to clarify what you actually want—the refined prompt is a natural byproduct of this thinking process.