I've written a lot of words—hundreds of blog posts, thousands of comments, tens of thousands of emails, and hundreds of thousands of short messages. I'm even written most of a book! In total, between personal and professional writing, I estimate to have put north of 3 million words into text. So it may come as a surprise that, despite all this experience, I still struggle to write well.

Sure, I've got the basics down, and when I put my mind to it I can achieve some measure of poetic prose. But to explain my ideas clearly, I still have to work quite hard for my writing to be understood.

Not all writers struggle with clarity. Some seem to be able to write exactly what they mean on the first pass and have their audience understand them. Others, like me, have to revise a lot, iterating over the same words dozens of times before they'll hang together. For example, it takes me about an hour to produce 100 words of finished text when I write about complex subjects, and I only speed up to 250 words/hour when the subject is simpler.

But what would happen if I didn't spend all that time revising? Would my writing really suffer that much?

It would.

Without extensive editing, my writing would be a jumbled mass of tangents, fragmented ideas, and confusing statements. You'd read my posts and probably think I said something I wouldn't endorse, or, worse yet, you'd give up reading me all together because it would take too much work. Thus I devote the time I must to editing for the simple reason that I want to convey ideas accurately and have people actually read them.

But why does my writing start out a mess? And why can't I do something, other than spend hours editing, to fix it? Because when my thoughts show up, they are like a scoop of spaghetti freshly dropped on a plate. The thought is definitely there, ready to be consumed, but the ideas are all tangled up, they don't combine to form a clear shape, and loose ends are left dangling over the side.

To be fair, my raw writing is not literally unintelligible, and sometimes people even like it because they like the ideas it contains. Still, it's not very good as writing. For example, here are some recent comments I made on Less Wrong that were written mostly stream-of-consciousness: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The last one is particularly egregious and in desperate need of editing. 

Words come out of me like they do because thoughts come into my mind as paragraph-sized gestalts. Writing my thoughts down is not impossible, but it requires great effort to convert them into specific words laid out in linear order. The task, for better and worse, is like taking a scoop of thought spaghetti off the plate, separating the noodles, wiping the sauce off, and then arranging them in neat rows on a new, clean plate.

It'd be nice if I could write how I think. I'd be able to share more of my ideas in less time, and I wouldn't have to devote so much mental effort to modeling how readers will interpret my words. Unfortunately, you wouldn't want to read anything I wrote that way. Every essay would be a miniature Infinite Jest, full of mixed-up narrative threads, abrupt asides, and random footnotes. And unlike David Foster Wallace and other difficult-to-read writers, few would power through my messy writing to understand it. So I've had to figure out how to say what I mean as clearly as I can and hope people will understand me.

I've developed a few strategies for writing over the years. They aren't very efficient, but they work reasonably well. They are:

1. Just write something down. I can't start editing until there are words I can read.
2. Reread what I wrote over and over. I keep at it until what I mean to say is clear.
3. Rewrite until it sounds natural. I have an eye for what good writing looks like, and keep rewording phrases until they sound right (and sound like me!).
4. Revisit writing over multiple days. I accept I'm not going to sit down and get it all done at once. I write for a while, then come back, reread, edit, and repeat that process on different days until I can read through what I wrote and have no edits I want to make.
5. Make use of cached patterns. Although I try to avoid cliches, I rely heavily on patterns that have worked for me in the past to turn ideas into words, combine those words into phrases, and string those phrases together into sentences and paragraphs and sections. It may make my writing a little stilted, but it's better than being original but incomprehensible.

I've also started using LLMs to help me write. One way I use them is to ramble my thoughts at them, then ask them to write a short version of what I said. Unfortunately, LLMs don't write great prose, so everything they produce requires editing. Luckily, I can use them to help me edit, too. I like to ask them for synonyms, alternative ways to phrase sentences, and examples to illustrate my points. They have allowed me quickly get unblocked on writing conundrums that previously took me days to solve.

But LLMs, so far, don't solve all my problems, and I'm still limited by my ability to express my ideas clearly enough to an LLM that it can figure out what I mean. So I struggle on with my spaghetti thoughts, laboriously converting them into words, working to fulfill my boundless desire to share what I've figured out with others.

Images created using DALLE-3. Thanks to Justis Mills for feedback.