Perhaps this is just common sense but I feel it worth mentioning that I am really beginning to feel the benefits of my blogging notes and thoughts on things I read and hear. I have made similar comments before but I’m now quite positive that writing on this blog is helping me remember ideas and information in relatively more organized and well-formed units that I can then produce in my conversations and later writings.
To repeat myself in less abstract terms: when I blog my ideas about something, say, my ideas about a collection of readings, a talk I went to, or some conversations I had with friends even, I am essentially writing a “response paper” of the kind that many of my classes have required, or do what one of my professors always suggested we do whenever time permitted: write “notes on notes.” This extra step of taking our notes or free-floating thoughts and reformulating them into a complete or relatively well organized compact exposition in writing offers considerable benefits.
I have found now that in some of my conversations, I am able to be more concise in my explanations of certain ideas or my narration of a certain anecdote because I’m actually regurgitating a blog entry. This occasionally leads to embarrassing results when you are speaking to someone who actually reads your blog as you notice them sigh with boredom.
Of course, by fixing the “relevant” ideas, placing them in a particular sequence, and drawing connections between them, we are in some sense “codifying” an experience or collection of thoughts that might otherwise have a more flexible and changing nature in our minds. Like history itself, our communication to others is of course not just about retelling facts from the past. We are constantly re-narrating and re-formulating our experiences and positions, so this occasional “codification” that writing on a blog or in a diary represents may actually create a small degree of friction in the continually evolving processing of our thoughts and memories. However, I would think it difficult to argue that this increased likelihood of our “jumping back” in a conversation to the most recent “codification” of an anecdote or written exposition of our thoughts is by necessity a problem. Essentially the same thing happens without writing (albeit more slowly), in cases where we retell the stories of our life with any great frequency – the memories and the narration of the events will gradually approach fossilization, even if they never stop evolving, until either death or some “shock” forces us to reformulate it (“Granpa, that isn’t the way it happened, you were one who started the fight with him!”).
On the contrary, when it comes to thinking about my study of history, for example, I find this compact writing practice especially important given my relative inability to synthesize large quantities of information on the fly. I have met many brilliant students who don’t share this weakness, but alas I’m not one of them. This process, whether it take the shape of simple “notes on notes” or a diary or a weblog, etc. allows people like me to more eloquently and efficiently share our thoughts with others during classes, conferences, or casual conversation in a compact “format” that is more conducive to eliciting useful responses and criticism.
Excellent observations about a phenomenon that by now must be very large. I haven’t noticed anyone else lay it out quite this way.
I want to point out an even simpler, more basic reason this “codifying” can have good effects. Concepts assemble themselves (at least in my mind) at first as a sort of nebulous collection of other concepts. In other words, one idea gets attached to another by some method of association, and you “understand” something that you didn’t before. Rarely are the concepts carried around mentally as full-grown sentences and paragraphs, though. They’re sort of a mish-mosh of visual image, feeling of connection, and key-words, to oversimplify it.
So even when I “understand” something, it can be hellish to try to communicate the understanding to someone else. Writing it in your blog (as in any other writing for communication) forces the thoughts into some organized, sensible, “communicable” form. It’s great practice for getting your previously vague thoughts to the point of communication, persuasion, or even teaching!
Well, now that I read again, I think I just said the same thing you did, but differently.