Our thoughts are incoherent and incomplete. After all, logical thinking is not something we are born with. It comes from intentional training.

I found this out the hard way in my freshman year, fall semester of my physics undergraduate at Peking University. I was using the study method I had back in high school: read through the materials a few times, do a few questions and correct my mistakes if I had any. It worked pretty well for me back in high school, so what could go wrong?

I barely passed a few of my classes that semester.

Where it went wrong was that college-level physics is far more challenging than high school physics. Back in high school, I relied heavily on my intuition to learn and got away with it. Because high school was easy. But doing physics at the college level is different, especially at Peking University where the STEM courses are known for their rigor.

When things don’t work, instead of putting more time into it, you change your methods.

I had to review my methods. That’s when I came across the Feynman study method [1]: You verbalize the concept you learnt to someone. Through this process, you find out that you didn’t know it as well as you thought you did. And you review and repeat. It’s only when you have successfully reproduced the concept then you have mastered it.

The reason why it works is probably because our thoughts are incoherent, abstract and fragmented. Things that seem intuitive and logical to me might make zero sense to someone else. To verbalize is to actualize information from our consciousness and let the gaps in our thinking show.

In that sense, writing would be the superior method compared to verbalizing [2]. When we speak, we utilize body language, facial expressions, tone and a myriad of social cues to help us convey information. We can even bluff and deceive people with flowery tricks and fool them into believing what we want them to believe. Advertising and demagoguery work this way.

But when we write, all non-verbal cues are stripped away and the only information that is conveyed are the things we write down, allowing for no room for fluff. Any inconsistent logic or weak reasoning can be weeded out upon reviewing the writing. There are still situations where verbalizing is preferred, for its rapid firing of ideas and potential for real-time feedback. But when it comes to checking the quality of one’s thinking, logic and philosophy, it seems like writing is the superior method.

I ended up doing pretty well in my second semester (and hopefully the same can be said for the time ahead [3]).

Notes

[1] Abbey Robins, The study tip they’re not telling you | How I went from a 2:2 to 80% at Cambridge University.

[2] Paul Graham, Putting Ideas into Words.

[3] An interesting trend I noticed: Other than being from a physics, CS or some kind of STEM background, most of the biggest startup founders are very expressive with words: many of them have blogs or tweet regularly. I believe writing is a common method they use to check their own thinking and ideas.