You decide you have something that you want to say and what you do is you proceed to think on paper. You take notes, write down various thoughts, arguments that you want to defend or refute, etc. But what is thinking on paper?
Instructions for “Thinking on Paper”
"Thinking on paper" is a general technique for making your thinking more explicit. It consists of writing down your thinking as you’re doing it, i.e., writing out your thoughts as you have them, in complete grammatical sentences.
The purpose of thinking on paper is twofold. First, it gives you more control over the thinking process. You can review and analyze your line of thought. It may slow you down and make your thinking more deliberate, which generally helps people be more methodical. It helps you deal with the problem of mental overload that is inherent in any difficult thinking. It gives you a means of reviewing your line of thinking and criticizing it—which is impossible if everything has to be held in mind at once.
The second advantage is that afterward you can observe and comment on the logic of your thought process. This is extremely helpful. By reading your thinking, you can understand any problems you have, and you can practice criticizing your own thinking. Being able to test the clarity of your own thinking is crucial. Start by writing down your overall goal. Then ask, "What’s the first step?" Answer that, which will lead to another question, so write that down and answer it. Write out all your thinking in full sentences, as a kind of dialog with yourself. You do not have to write quickly, but you should write continuously. Keep asking yourself questions and answering them until you are sure you have reached your goal. (Of course, if you are stuck then you should change your goal to formulating a question that you can’t answer that captures your difficulty exactly.)
While you’re thinking on paper, try to hold yourself to a high standard of objectivity. Try to make your discussion logical. If something is not logical, say that and try to re-think the point. The purpose of thinking on paper is not to record a stream of consciousness—it is to make your thinking more methodical.
However, DO NOT EDIT your thinking on paper. If something you just wrote seems wrong, just say so in a new sentence, and give a new answer.
Despite trying to be logical, the result of your thinking on paper will be a pseudo-essay with questions and answers, false starts and dead-ends, and ideas from the blue. Don’t worry about that. The purpose is to make the whole process explicit.
However, you don’t stop with just the first round of thinking. All thinking on paper should involve a 2-pass approach. After a break (a few hours or a few days), you should go back and review your thinking, looking for holes and loose ends. On your second pass, you should test your assumptions, extract implicit ideas, and generally put all your ideas under an eagle-eye test. This second phase is done as another round of thinking on paper, in which you summarize and criticize your thinking from the previous day.
The content of thinking is a purposeful process of asking oneself questions and pursuing the answers. Thus, the key to thinking is asking the right questions, in the right order.
For example, when you are trying to survey your knowledge, you need to use very broad questions (who, what, where, when, how, why) to stimulate you in a wide range of directions. Alternatively, when you are trying to test your assumptions, you need to ask critical questions: "what does this imply?" or "is this literally true?" Alternatively, when you are trying to find the fundamental, you need to ask, “Which of these gives rise to the other” or “which of these explains the other?”
Approach thinking on paper just as if you are not writing at all. You are learning; you are not writing.
It is important that you are conscientious here – do not conclude too quickly that everything is clear to you. Sometimes with seemingly easy issues, you would think that after asking a bunch of questions you have a lot to think about.
You have to be convinced that you understand your subject and that you have asked all of the questions that you needed to in order to really know that you understand. You should NOT be concerned about having more raw material than you need for what you are writing. You will always have more than you will need. Writing is selective. You will have to select from what you do know about a given subject in order to write. This means that it is a problem if you put everything that you do know about a given subject into what you write. You will not get it all in and this is how it should be. Having too much knowledge is not a problem, rather it is a good thing – it is a prerequisite for writing.
I'd love to know what you think. Feel free to contact me directly at john.dennis@unipg.it or schedule a call at https://calendly.com/drjohndennis.