4 Ways to Express Your Thoughts in Writing

Today, we’ve got some strategies to help you get your thoughts out of your head and into print.

I’m always a little surprised by how much worse my drawings are than the images that I can imagine. In my mind’s eye, I can see wonderful things with fantastic detail, but something happens when I grab a pencil and try to recreate what I’ve visualized. A lot can get lost in the translation from my brain to my hand and then to the paper.

And I know a similar thing happens for some people when they’re writing. They know what they want to say—but it just doesn’t come out right when they try to write it. And that can be awfully frustrating.

Luckily, I think it can be much easier to translate thoughts into writing than to translate mental pictures into drawings. For one, even if you don’t consider yourself a great writer, you’re probably pretty good at putting things into words already. We just need to find a way to help you to leverage those skills when you struggle with a writing task.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about today. If you ever feel like there’s something blocking your thoughts on the way to the page, I’ve got some suggestions to help you get around the blockage and to make sure that your thoughts are more accurately represented by your writing.

Of course, if that’s the sort of thing that sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll subscribe. There’s plenty more where this is coming from, and I think you’ll find other good insights and suggestions to help you to polish your writing and sharpen your rhetorical skills.

But anyway, here are 4 ways to help you make sure that you actually get your thoughts out of your head and into your writing.

Write Everything—then Revise

Have you ever really listened to someone just talking? When we speak naturally, the things we say are full of broken sentences, false starts, hesitations, rephrasings, repetitions, likes, and ums. And those things attract a lot of negative attention in speech classes, but people hardly even notice them when they’re in the middle of a conversation.

That’s because it’s perfectly natural to need multiple attempts to get your thoughts out of your head in a way that makes sense. If you start saying something to your friend and then have to start the sentence over because you didn’t quite say what you wanted to, nobody is going bat an eye—that’s how talking works.

Of course, all of the very natural messiness of normal speech isn’t visible in writing—but that doesn’t mean that written sentences come out perfectly all at once on the first try. If you think that you have to get it right in writing on the first try, you’re putting too much pressure on yourself—pressure that you probably don’t put on yourself when it comes to having a conversation with someone.

So take the pressure away and just write everything that’s in your head—everything that comes to mind. Spill it all out into your word processor or journal or wherever you’re writing. Even if you end up writing the same sentence a few different ways or give up on a sentence halfway through. Write everything, even if it’s garbage nonsense.

At this point, you’re not writing your final project, you’re just writing your thoughts as they come to you. And that’s important because, if you think you have to write your thought perfectly in the first sentence that you attempt, there’s a high likelihood that that sentence won’t quite capture what you’re after. But, if you write everything and just dump all your thoughts onto the page, there’s a 100% chance that the sentence you’re after is somewhere in that mess. You just have to find it.

And the truth is that finding the right sentence can be a lot easier than writing the right sentence. If you’re struggling to find the words for your ideas and you have seven variations of the same sentence on the page, then you can look them over and just pick the one that you like best. Or you can take parts from one sentence, parts from another, and parts from yet another and then put them all together into a sentence that actually captures what you were trying to say.

That might sound like a lot of work—but it’s no more work than staring at an empty page trying to force the words to come out right on the first try. Plus, it’s probably a lot more similar to the way you use language in everyday life. It’s perfectly normal and natural to search for the right words as you’re saying them—so give yourself a chance to search for the right words as you’re writing them. Then, when you find them, it’s really easy to hit the delete key and get rid of all the other stuff.

I had a teacher who swore by this approach to writing. In fact, in one of the classes I took from him, we regularly had to write for a set amount of time in response to a particular prompt. It didn’t matter what we wrote as long as we kept writing everything that was in our head. Near the end of the term, we had amassed a reasonable stack of thoughts about writing and language. Then he told us to throw away half of it and to build an essay out of what was left.

And let me tell you, it is far easier to cut twelve pages of messy writing down to a strong six-page essay than to try to write a good essay from scratch. When you have a blank page and you’re pressuring yourself to write one perfect sentence after another, you’re going to struggle. When you set yourself free to write as messily as you probably speak, then all you have to do is get rid of the sentences that don’t properly communicate your point. And deleting bad sentences is so much easier than writing amazing ones on your first try.

Just Say It

I’ve talked before about an experience that I have pretty regularly. A student will come into my office with an essay that is hard to read and understand. They spent a long time writing their draft, and it just isn’t doing their thoughts justice—their thoughts haven’t gotten from their brain to the page.

In those moments, I like to set the actual paper aside and just ask my students what they actually mean to say. Without fail, they explain their ideas in beautiful and interesting and perfectly clear terms. They say they’re having so much trouble getting their thoughts out—but then they have no trouble explaining those thoughts out loud. After they finish explaining their thoughts, I tell them that everything that they just said should be in the paper.

More often than you think, those students look at me with a little bit of surprise in their eyes, as if to say, You mean I can just write it the way I explained it?

Yes! You totally can—and you should! Because you explained it way way better than you wrote it.

But I understand why those students are surprised. We have this idea that writing is serious and formal and full of rules, so it’s natural to think that we can’t just write things the way we would say them. But that’s nonsense—you can—and you should—write things the way you would say them.

Sure, some people like to say that writing and speaking are different activities, but they’re really not that different. And the differences really only matter when you’re writing the next great novel. For most people and in most situations, the gap between writing and speaking is much narrower so there’s no reason you can’t write things the way you say them.

So, if you’re struggling to get your thoughts onto paper, forget about getting them onto paper at all and just say them. Record your own voice if it’s helpful—and then write down what you said. You may decide to tweak what you said when you finally write it down, but, again, it’s likely going to be easier than coming up with perfect sentences from nothing.

Get an Outside Opinion

Even when you do feel like you have some decent writing put together, it can be a challenge to know that your readers will understand it the way you want them to. It’s something that I struggled with a for a long time, and it’s something that we’ve talked about before. So, rather than just struggle in your own head and hope you get it right—ask someone! Find a reader and ask them to tell you how they understand your writing.

This suggestion is perhaps less useful for people who don’t know where to start, but it can be a big help if you don’t know for sure that what you’ve written actually matches what you have in your head. That’s why getting an outside opinion can be so helpful—it gives you access to a perspective on your writing that is independent from all the noise in your brain.

In other words, when you think you have your thoughts on paper, share them with someone and ask them to confirm it. Over the years, I’ve learned that readers have a habit of understanding my writing in surprising ways. Each time a reader points out a way that my writing has not reflected by thoughts accurately, I’ve learned something about how to make the gap between my thoughts and writing smaller.

So share your writing with someone if you’re able to, and ask them what they understand. Then share what you meant to say and see if they can help you figure out how to revise your writing to make your point more transparently. Where the first two suggestions in this video can help you get your thoughts out of your head at all, this suggestion can help you to confirm that your efforts were, in fact, successful.

In the End, Just Practice

The biggest hurdle for me when it comes to drawing what I can visualize is my lack of technical skill. I can imagine things, but I don’t have the mastery or technique to make very good use of that imagination. And a similar issue is at work when we struggle to get our thoughts out in writing.

That is, you might know exactly what you want the world to know, but you just might not have the skills yet to pick the right words and to put them in the right order. First of all—that’s totally okay—there is plenty of time to get better at it. But it’s something to be aware of. Getting your thoughts out of your head and onto the page might be hard because developing new skills is hard.

The only thing to do then is to practice. Give yourself opportunities to try putting your thoughts into writing without a lot of pressure. Write in a journal. Send letters or emails to friends and family. Start a blog. Every time you try to put your thoughts into writing, it will get a little easier.

Read and study the work of writers you admire. Learn new words and practice using them. Improve your knowledge of grammar, usage, punctuation, and style. Everything you learn will help you to write your thoughts more precisely. Just think of it: you’ll have a much easier time telling someone what color paint you want if you know 500 words for different colors than if you only know 12. The more your technical skill improves, the more effectively you’ll be able to write what you actually mean to write.

And, above all, just give yourself time. It might feel like you have to be an incomprehensibly amazing writer right now—but you don’t. You just need to be a better writer today than you were yesterday, and practice is the only way to get there.

So go get practicing, and we’ll see you again in the next video. In the meantime, share your questions and comments below—especially if there’s something you’d like to talk about in the future. Like others on the channel, this video was inspired by one of your comments—so don’t be shy.

Anyhow, tchau for now.