Why Write?

what it does, how it works, why you'd accept its vulnerability

“Why write, at all?”

The question might seem trivial - perhaps an answer readily came to mind. Or it might seem like just another self-referential loop: you can ask the same of thinking, philosophy, or science, as they all bend back on themselves. You philosophize about philosophy. You study science scientifically. You think about thinking.

But there is a difference. When you think about thinking, the thought flickers and revises and leaves no residue. When you write about writing, you have already done the thing. The artifact is sitting there, refusing to unexist.

This is one of the senses in which writing is distinctive: it is the medium through which other activities become external. Philosophy and science, when they want to become contestable and transmissible, pass through writing. Speech works, too, but writing persists. It’s sequential, returnable, fixed in a way thought is not.

The circularity of writing is also more immediately apparent. When I write “why write?” I have already answered by demonstration, in a way that is visible on the page. When I think “why think?” there is no such evidence; thought is ephemeral, self-revising, deniable. Writing is not.

That is the peculiar status of writing. Not an activity alongside philosophy or science or rigorous thought, but where those activities go when they want to become real in a particular way. Accountable. Contestable. Present for someone who isn’t you, including the future version of yourself who’ll read this and wince, or nod, or not remember writing it at all.

So maybe the question to ask isn’t quite “why write?” The real question is:

Why would you take a thought - which could remain safely yours, fluid, revisable, deniable - and pin it down somewhere it can be caught?

There are several answers to that question, and they pull in different directions. This essay is an attempt to see whether they share a root.

The Writing Tree

The image that keeps returning is arboreal: trunk, limbs, branches. Maybe that’s Montesquieu’s influence; the Spirit of the Laws taxonomized political power into three domains, and something about that architecture stuck. Or maybe trees are just how we think about things that are unified at the base and divergent at the extremities. Either way, here’s the structure I keep arriving at.

Recall the reframed question: why pin a thought down where it can be caught? The most basic answer is that you want it to be answerable: to yourself later, to others, to the pressure the sentence itself exerts as it is being written. That pressure has several registers: the craft constraints of grammar and rhythm, the logical demand that you actually mean something, and further still something harder to name - the way the written thought pushes back on the writer, refusing formulations that don’t quite work. That suggests a trunk: externalization that creates accountability. This is the first answer to why you’d pin a thought down where it can be caught: because you want it to be caught. You want it to be testable, transmissible, binding.

Three main limbs branch from this trunk.

The first is epistemic: writing as a mode of knowing. Thought completes itself through formalization. The half-formed intuition, forced into syntax, becomes something you can inspect, test, and check against reality. You discover what you actually believe when you try to defend it in a sentence – and you discover what you don’t understand when the paragraph collapses under its own weight. This is where “writing is thinking” lives. Not writing as the transcription of prior thought, but writing as the medium in which certain thoughts become possible at all.

The second is social, or temporal: writing as transmission across minds and time. The bridge function. You write for someone who isn’t present – a reader next week, next century, or never. There’s an asymmetry here: you can’t know their context, yet you’re trying to construct something that will land without your presence to clarify or defend it. Every act of writing is a wager that your arrangement of words might matter to someone you’ll never meet. This is where “leaving a note for someone you’ll never meet” lives. It’s also where the accumulated weight of culture lives – the library, the archive, the long conversation across generations.

The third is constitutive: writing as self-formation. You become the person who committed to this position, accepted this vulnerability. The person who wrote this draft is different from the one who left the thought unwritten. Not because the content changed them – that’s too simple – but because the commitment did. You can’t un-become the person who pinned this thought down. This is where “practice over product” lives: the claim that the value of writing isn’t only in what gets produced but in what the writer becomes through producing it.

Why these three? Each identifies a different relational structure. Epistemic is world-to-self (getting reality right). Social is self-to-other (bridging isolation across space and time). Constitutive is self-to-self-over-time (becoming). They aren’t competing accounts of why writing matters; rather, they are dimensions of a single activity. You can’t falsify what stays internal (epistemic). You can’t transmit what isn’t fixed (social). You can’t commit to what remains in superposition (constitutive).

There are derivative branches - persuasion, cultural memory, catharsis, legacy, clarification - but they hang from these three limbs rather than constituting separate trunks.¹

This taxonomy is useful, but it may rest on a more fundamental insight about what writing does structurally. Consider an argument from Peli Grietzer: artistic works function as compressed representations that can be more informative about structure than the raw material from which they’re derived. A poem about envy is more than a record of thoughts about envy: it distills those thoughts into a form that reveals structural relationships invisible in the uncompressed original. The compression is the knowledge.

This doesn’t replace our trunk, but it does explain how it works. Externalization creates accountability because it forces legible compression. You must choose this word, this structure, this formalization, and in choosing you become answerable to what you chose. The fog of alternatives collapses into a single encoding.

The three limbs remain, but their unity becomes clearer:

• Epistemic = the compression reveals structure (world to mind)

• Social = the compression is transmissible (mind to mind)

• Constitutive = the compression shapes the compressor (mind to self-over-time)

What connects them at the trunk is no longer just “you wrote it down.” It’s that writing forces lossy encoding under constraints, and the constraints determine whether what emerges is signal or noise.

Does the Medium Matter?

Does the way we write matter? If writing is compression under constraints, does the mode of compression matter? Typing versus handwriting, dialogue versus solitary drafting – are these different machines, or variations on one?

These are variations in resistance and temporality rather than fundamentally different cognitive modes. Handwriting is slower, more embodied, spatially encoded – you remember where on the page something was. Typing is faster, more fluid, closer to the pace of thought. Dialogue introduces real-time accountability and the genuine otherness of another mind. Solo generation lacks that otherness but gains something else: you can’t outsource coherence to the interlocutor.

But the common substrate is externalization that persists and pushes back. The handwritten page, the typed document, the conversational record – they all create something you can return to as partially alien, something that resists your revisionist memory of what you meant. The differences matter, but they’re degrees of friction, not different machines.

What writing provides isn’t necessity but affordance: persistence (you can return), resistance (the bad sentence announces itself), and estrangement (you read yourself as another). These make rigor easier, more likely, more sustainable. They democratize what would otherwise require rare cognitive discipline.

So the claim shouldn’t be “writing is necessary for rigorous thought” but “writing is the most reliable prosthesis for rigorous thought available to ordinary minds.”

It’s not that the mind requires writing to be rigorous, but that writing creates a kind of mind that values a particular mode of rigor – and then retroactively delegitimizes what it displaced. Oral cultures had their own forms of precision: meter and formulae that aided memory, communal correction, the discipline of live performance. They’re different, but not inferior; literate culture tends to forget this.

And there may be forms of knowing that writing cannot reach at all. Buddhist epistemology, for instance, posits forms of direct knowing – prajna, non-conceptual insight – that are explicitly degraded by linguistic formalization. The claim isn’t that such knowledge is vague or evasive; it’s that propositional structure is the wrong container for it. Meditators across traditions report something like certainty arising from sustained attention rather than discursive elaboration. Writing can describe this, but cannot enact it – the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. If writing is lossy compression, prajna might be the capacity to sustain lossless awareness – to hold the superposition without forcing collapse. A writing-centric epistemology may not even recognize it as knowledge, precisely because it resists the encoding that writing demands.

There’s something recursive here worth acknowledging. By writing about why writing matters, I’m enacting the constitutive function I described – becoming the person who thought this through, committed to this structure, accepted this vulnerability. The question of whether it matters can’t be separated from that enactment.

Will this matter?

The honest answer is: you can’t know in advance. That’s the wager. Mattering isn’t a circumscribed property of the work at the moment of creation – it can also be a relationship that forms (or doesn’t) between the work and some future reader, some future problem, some future moment when someone needed exactly that articulation.

But we needn’t accept that frame just because it is familiar. The question presupposes that mattering is primarily about reception: being read, cited, remembered. There’s another version: writing matters because of what it does to the writer. You become the person who worked this out, who committed to that position, who accepted the vulnerability of being wrong in public.

That person is different from the one who kept it all safely internal.

This is the deeper answer to why you’d pin a thought down where it can be caught. Not because you want to be caught out – but because you want to become the person who was willing to be.

So maybe the question isn’t ‘will this matter?’ but ‘what kind of thinker do I want to be?’ – and writing is the practice that answers it.

There’s an ethical dimension, too. To write is to accept accountability for your claims. To keep them internal is, in a sense, to cheat – not others, but yourself. You forfeit the feedback that would tell you whether your thinking holds. We’re describing something like the phenomenology of commitment – how an idea that exists in superposition across possible meanings collapses into that meaning, that formalization, once written. The etymology is apt: the word ‘decision’ comes from the Latin de-caedere, to cut off. To decide on a phrasing is to kill the alternatives. And yes, that collapse is loss. But it’s also the only way to build. You can’t iterate on fog – you’ll just agitate ephemeral swirls and eddies.

All of this might seem to argue against the oldest writing advice: just write. But that advice has a peculiar structure – it’s true at the beginning and true at the end, but false in the middle.

The honest novice, writing to discover what they think, is doing real epistemic work. Their selection criteria are crude but genuine. They’re compressing with the tools they have.

The intermediate, who has heard that good writers “just write” and mimics the ritual without having metabolized the craft, is cargo-culting. They are operating with borrowed selection criteria – rules adopted from the outside, rather than constraints that have become part of how they see. For them, “just write” is actively harmful advice. What they need is explicit technique: conscious application of criteria, deliberate revision, the slow work of internalizing what good compression feels like.

The expert’s “just write” is different again. The selection criteria have become so deeply internalized they operate as tacit constraints, no longer requiring explicit articulation because they’re structuring the process from within. The advice sounds identical to the novice’s, but the referent has changed entirely.

Zen has a formulation: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. The content is the same. The epistemic status is transformed.

Concluding thoughts

Writing, then, isn’t just externalization-that-persists. It’s harnessed compression under constraints set by purpose, and what you’re trying to do shapes what counts as good compression. Your purposes set the boundary conditions that determine which outputs count as success – what Denis Noble calls ‘teleologically-structured boundary conditions’. The stochasticity of thought (associative drift, half-formed gestures, intuitive reaches) is the raw material. Writing provides the selection pressure, the constraint that forces collapse into this particular formalization.

What determines whether the compression reveals structure or produces Rorschach artifacts (patterns that reflect the interpreter’s projections rather than anything in the domain)?

The answer seems to be: the degree to which the selection criteria – the ‘why’ of the writing, the implicit theory of what matters – are genuinely responsive to the domain rather than projections onto noise.

Which returns us, finally, to the question we started with. Why write? Because it’s how you find out whether your selection criteria are any good. Why accept the vulnerability of pinning it down? Because that’s the only way to find out. The page will tell you – if you let it.

1. Derivative branches (important but not fundamental):
- Persuasion (branch of social)
- Cultural memory/accumulation (branch of social + temporal)
- Catharsis (branch of constitutive)
- Status/legacy (branch of social, arguably parasitic)
- Clarification for others (branch of social)]