Day 43, rapid writing

Getting information down in a rush is fraught with error.

While the writer might fully understand what they are thinking. They understand their viewpoint. They don’t necessarily understand all the included bias and the incidental and tangential argument, which under some circumstances becomes plainly apparent. This may become noticeably clear in the case, for example, when having a rant about something that has just been on the radio. The thoughts are quickly written and committed, incoherence and all. Adding to that confusion there is the point that the writer thinks they understand what they are thinking. Which is not necessarily the same thing at all, and which often becomes plain to the writer as the struggle to put an idea or argument into words makes it obvious that all that exists is a jumble of ideas, phrases, and incoherent argument.

So with the above myriad of inconsistencies in mind It is very easy to put ideas down in an order that can lead to interpretation of what a writer says in completely the wrong way. This being due to the convoluted structure and the lack of absolute and specific pointers to the things the writer is referring to and at what time. It only takes the ordering of ideas that pour out of the imagination in random fashion to be committed to text in that same random fashion for confusion to arise.

Without proof reading, or without a brief or longer cooling off period, depending on the purpose of the writing, there are inevitably going to be problem phrase and sentence constructions and ordering problems that lead to ambiguity.

The answer is that it is always better to review at some later point. However this defeats the purpose of trying to write something on the spur of the moment. It is still possible to do the ‘instant idea’ writing, although if there is something that misrepresents what is actually thought then it is worthwhile to go back and edit, in a blog for example. In normal life it is better to review after a suitable pause, even emails of a couple of sentences in length, before pressing send, sharing, and letting the words out for interpretation.