“Writing is thinking” is commonplace advice¹, but there is some nuance to it.

People repeat it to encourage journaling, or to explain why the essay they wrote clarified something, or to talk about the struggle of getting words out. But saying it this way obscures what’s actually happening.

Writing isn’t thinking because of the words. It’s thinking because of the decisions. What comes first. What belongs together. What gets its own sentence and what gets subordinated into a clause. What’s in, what’s out.

The thinking is in the structuring. Writing just happens to be one way to structure.

This explains why other activities feel like thinking too. Diagramming a system. Outlining a talk. Organizing a room. Making a playlist. Writing code. None of these are “writing” in the usual sense, but they all require you to impose order on material that didn’t have that order before.

The shape doesn’t exist until you make it.

It also explains why some writing doesn’t feel like thinking at all. Stream of consciousness, filling in templates, transcribing what you already know , words appear, but no decisions are being made. The structure is absent or borrowed. The page fills up and not much has happened.

The reason free-writing is encouraged is because it’s a nice way to get in the groove of getting some representation of the raw material your mind is dealing with. Once you’ve free-written for a while, you start to pick up on patterns and start to derive structure from all those notes.

The real work is choosing. This before that. These things grouped, those things separated. This word and not that one, because the word carries a frame. A hierarchy thinks differently than a flat list. A timeline thinks differently than a spatial map. Every structure forecloses alternatives and makes certain thoughts easier to reach.

So when people say “I need to write to this figure out”, they’re not wrong, they’re just a bit imprecise. What they need is to structure. Writing is one tool for that. Talking to someone is another, the other person forces you to sequence your thoughts, to make them cohere. A whiteboard is another. Even silence can be, if you’re internally arranging. A lot of my colleagues call it “brewing”. We’ll usually end calls with “hey let me brew this for a bit and I’ll get back to you.”

When you’re mulling something over, staring at the ceiling, not yet writing, that’s still thinking to me. You’retrying out shapes until one holds. Maybe thinking bottoms out in structure the way physics bottoms out in math. You can’t go beneath it.

Your choice of tools influences your choice for structure. The medium you reach for determines what kind of ordering is easy and what’s impossible. A physical notebook affords certain structures, aspreadsheet affords others. A digital blank canvas can afford yet another set of structures.

A lot of seasoned authors talk about how “re-writing” is where the real work happens. It’s not about the words, it’s about the structure.

The reason I’ve been reflecting on this is because we now have tools that we can use to outsource our thinking. For the first time in my life I have noticed myself asking “Have I truly thought about this or am I just borrowing from whatever Claude gave me ?”. It has happened to me multiple times that I would give a scrappy note to Claude and it would come up with all the structures which are incorrect or incomplete. I still “wrote”, but the structuring was borrowed, the thinking was outsourced.

To write is to try to structure. To structure is to think. The words are just how the structure becomes visible.