I often summarize what I've learned and think about the remaining questions before I walk and go to bed, and after a period of reading and thinking, a general framework of knowledge gradually comes to mind. Then I would write it down, and I was often surprised to find that as I wrote, new content kept popping up, as if my keyboard was thinking for itself.

I wrote about the benefits of writing down the thought process of problem solving in an article "Learning to Solve Problems with Polya" most of the year ago, and the same holds true for regular thinking.

The benefits of writing are as follows. - Writing is a memo for thinking: when people think about a problem, sometimes it is difficult to go back to the place where they went off on a tangent once they have thought too far. And the thinking process will be recorded, it gives us the possibility to completely retrace their own thinking trajectory. For example, when facing a problem, we often come up with several main and key thinking directions, but if we don't have notes, we can only start thinking one by one, and then we forget what the second point is. If I take notes, I will first list out the key directions of thinking, and then expand one by one. If I find something new in the process of thinking about any branch, but I don't have time to think about it, I will use keywords to write it down, and then go back and think about it later. In a way, the notes serve as a memo here.

- Writing is communication with others: everyone's thinking has some blind spots, and the reason why blind spots are blind spots is that they are difficult to perceive. The more I learn about the characteristics of human thinking, the more I realize from the bottom of my heart how important it is to discuss with people, everyone's blind spots are different, your blind spots can be supplemented by others, and others' blind spots can be corrected by you. Herein lies the meaning of three stinkers topping one Zhuge Liang. The most important value of writing down and communicating with others lies in this. In addition to blind spots, it is generally difficult to be aware of gaps in our own body of knowledge, and if we make a serious mistake in our own thinking because of our ignorance of an important piece of knowledge, it is generally difficult to reflect on it

- if you don't know something, there is a high probability that you don't know that you don't know it either. And writing out your own reflections so that others can find the holes is a good thing for your own body of knowledge.

- Sometimes, language itself also thinks: when it is not put into writing, the existence of ideas in the mind is often more vague and abstract, sometimes even in the form of images, however, if you need to write it out, or even write it out for others to see and communicate with others, you must use written symbols, which actually have their own set of systems, called in computational linguistics Semantic network, the same concept, vague feeling in the brain, and explicitly expressed to reach a particular word, is not the same. You will use a particular word and thus think of another word, and as you write you will find that some words bring out other words as if they had a spirit of their own. Sometimes this effect can lead to writing becoming a word game, but the upside is that there are times when it can be beneficial to broaden or inspire the mind.

Before you start writing your ideas, I know that many people don't write because they think there is nothing to write about. In fact, this is a strange circle, the more you don't start writing and always take the limited cache of thinking to meditate on a problem, the less content you have to write about. If you force yourself to write down some immature ideas, look at what you have written and try to expand them further, it is possible to be on the rational of going far, far down the road.