Writing Is Clarified Thinking

I never learned to type. Not properly, anyway. I learned about proper finger positioning for fast typing—like 120 WPM fast. But I never actually practiced enough to be fast.

But I always wanted to write – and write more. I thought the typing was the problem with not writing more. I tried everything to speed things up.

Way back in the mid-2000s, I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software. That didn’t work.

Then, I tried the Dvorak method for a long time. That was weird.

Then, I tried just speed typing with my existing hunt-and-peck. I got faster, but only by like 10%.

Then, Google Docs got voice typing…and it even synced to my phone. That…was great for texting…but not writing.

Then, OpenAI’s model GPT-3.5 came out. It wasn’t even on ChatGPT yet. I hacked together an API setup. And holy cow – faster than I ever dreamed. And I was telling it to type. GPT-4 came out and I added it to my docs, website, etc. That didn’t work…even though it work in other ways.

And those other ways confused me. I was plainly thinking about the topic. And I was plainly guiding, outlining, and editing the AI. And – I was going much faster. GPT-4 was incredibly capable, but as a writing tool, it still didn’t solve my real problem.

Writing fast with AI made me understand what no book, coach, method, practice, etc ever really made me understand about writing, or at least, the way I like to write.

Writing is about clarifying thoughts. The real magic of typing letters and words in sequence is that there are no muddled thoughts or body language to convey an idea. An idea that makes sense in the swirl of the brain or animated retelling can fall apart when it has to be translated to words. And an AI will gladly screw up an incoherent thought. Or worse, it can tell you what the incoherent thought is truly about.

Being able to write fast is less about fast fingers or fast software and more about clear thoughts & coherent ideas. I still love voice typing and AI writing tools, but I think they are best used at the end of the writing process after I know what I think.