"writing is the creative by-product of my learning and thinking process."

"A tool for better thinking is necessarily a tool for better writing, and a tool that helps you write better is necessarily also an aid in thinking."

"the more precisely and accurately we can model our ideas about the world in words, the better we can think. Polishing our writing is like cleaning the lenses through which we think about our experiences. Naturally, better writing yields clearer ideas."

"Feynman argued that writing was not merely a record or trace of what he thought, but rather the medium through which he thought that enabled him to think more consciously."

"Our brains are good at thinking moment to moment, but not over time, especially across days and weeks and months. Writing helps us think better because it allows us to think across time."

"When we take notes, we render our thoughts onto paper so that we can hold onto them even when they aren’t at the top of our minds. We can lay out a hundred different ideas on paper and move them around to connect them and group them easily."

"Every time we write, we open a small room for our thoughts. Rather than trying to hold them all in our minds, we lay them out, in the order in which they came to us, so that we can jump between them and explore them at our leisure."

"Chris Granger makes a careful distinction between tools and mediums that I think is relevant here. He defines a tool as something that takes an existing workflow, and makes it more efficient."

"A medium, on the other hand, gives us new agency or power by which we can do something we couldn’t do before."

"If we want to build something that aids us both in our thinking process and the expression of our ideas – a thinking-writing thing – that thing must be a medium, not a tool."