Writing improves thinking

Yesterday, a friend told me she felt especially sad. On the same day she'd sent her late mother's things to auction, her son wrote a poignant blog post about leaving the United States for the mission field in India, forwarding what he'd written.

The post was moving, encapsulating both the excitement of embarking on a journey to a foreign country and a healthy fear of the unknown as well as a sadness at leaving the only life he's known. Here's an excerpt:

Our tickets are bought. November 18. That's the day we uproot our little family, board a plane, and skip across the globe to plant ourselves in South Asia. The date stares at me from the calendar on my desk.

I had breakfast with my brother Joe the other day. I'd always thought moving overseas would be one big, dramatic airport-hugs-and-kisses goodbye. But it's really a thousand goodbyes that creep into everyday moments like bagels and coffee with a brother and make them heavy with solemnity.

My friend's son and his wife have been blogging for years now about raising children and following their call. As a result, he writes clearly. He's able to take what's in his head and heart and put it on paper with clarity, with precision, with style.

No process is better for clarifying thinking than writing. It forces you to confront what you think and feel about things. If you can't express your thoughts in your writing, then you haven't spent enough time alone with them, distilling them. If you want to move people with your thinking, then practice extracting it from your head and putting it into words.

In my experience, if you want to think better, write. Then write better. Plying each skill improves the other, in turn.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE BIOGRAPHY

Here is a sample answer to the writing exercise of Ernest Hemingway's biography:

Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1899. He had a middle-class upbringing, as his father was a doctor. However all his life he rebelled against the morals of his parents and the conventions of life in Chicago.
He graduated from High School in 1917, but, being impatient for a less sheltered environment, he didn't go to college. Instead, he went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for a leading newspaper, "The Star", and this gave him invaluable vocational training.
He wanted to be soldier, but was rejected for military service because he had poor eyesight, so he became an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was injured in World War I, and also decorated for heroism.
He was fascinated by war, working as a war correspondent in Spain, China and Europe, and many of his books were about war, For Whom the Bell Tolls, his most succesful book, was written in 1940, and is about a volunteer American soldier in the Spanish Civil War. This book dealt with the comradeship of war, while A Farewell to Arms is about the pointlessness of war.
He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1954, but he suffered from depression towards the end of his life. He loved life, although he was obsessed with death, and he committed suicide in 1961.