Typing vs Writing

I type faster than I can write. But regardless of how I put my thoughts down, the speed at which my thoughts can keep up with me putting them down is the same^[1]. I believe that my speed of thought is right in-between the speed of my handwriting and typing; and this effects how I perceive the general act of writing^[2] on my abilities to articulate.

Let’s explore an analogy.

Imagine a “producer” of data which inputs data in packets of size I into the system, the packets are produced unpredictably, but it is guaranteed that they come in packets of fixed size I when a new packet is produced. Then, there’s a pipe in which the input must past through to be used as output. This pipe has capacity P. (It may be helpful to visualize a physical pipe^[3] with a decently wide diameter, and incoming “packets” as blobs of liquid, or some other material of your choice.)

When P < I, we have a “bottle-neck”. Each following packet must wait for the one before to be processed in the pipe, because an entire packet cannot fit into the pipe at one time.

When P >= I, the pipe must wait for new packets to come much more often than when P < I because all incoming packets can be processed instantly as they come.

The producer here would henceforth be whichever part of my brain that produces thought, where the packets of data would be thoughts themselves — a single, standalone strand of thought that can be articulated by a word (an idea to swap an existing word with better vocabulary), a phrase, a sentence (which expresses the thought), or even paragraphs or an essay (which explains a point). You can then imagine the “pipe” or whatever the pipe is connected to on the opposite side, be the medium in which I express my thoughts — through writing on paper, through typing, through speech.

You might then draw the connection here where I theorize that P would be less than I in the case of writing (since my writing speed is relatively slower), and P is greater than or equal to I in the case of typing.

Allow me to now match my experiences with those effects I have listed for each of the conditions above about waiting/processing packets.

When writing, I often feel as though my mind is brimming with ideas on how to continue a sentence, what I can write next. All the while my hand is still focused on how the current letter should be drawn.

When typing, I can complete the process of putting down the thought currently being processed pretty quickly. Often, I’m at a loss of what to type next and have to pause.

What this means is that, writing by hand feels like many “packets” of thoughts queueing up behind a pipe too narrow in diameter just waiting to be let out. But there’s no rush. While these thoughts wait in the background, they get to “mature”. I might consider amendments to them when I finally come around to write them down.

Typing, on the other hand, makes it so all the initial “draft” versions of the thoughts are the ones materialized and I don’t get as much time mentally to chew over certain ideas before they get put on the screen. Furthermore, I would often finish typing a word or sentence then suddenly finding myself stuck, unable to determine what to type next — I lose my “train of thoughts”. My thinking can’t catch up with how quickly I’m able to type it all out. I’m often left feeling empty, no longer confident I’m able to complete the piece at all^[4].

But is being able to make adjustments to thoughts after letting them “mature” in the waiting room actually a good thing? Is it better to lower the friction between the process in my mind (thinking), and the process of writing it down? Does the increased length of breaks between the sentences typed lead to (or incentivize) longer, more focused, periods of reviewing my work? If I work on eliminating self-doubt and lack of confidence, perhaps the (increased) psychological effects caused by typing faster than I think would simply be of little significance — my hands resting on my keyboard are simply waiting for my thinking to catch up, and the analysis ends there?

I feel slow and unproductive when writing, thinking I could easily complete the task on my computer. But often I find that the written work I produce is of better quality than when I type it out. There are of course many factors that should be considered when figuring out which method of putting thoughts down works best for you; here I have only explored one aspect of the differences between typing and writing: imagining them as methods that process thoughts as they come with and the effects of the discrepancy in its “processing speed”.