Almost anyone will agree that thinking must precede writing, since everyone knows that one purpose of writing is to convey to others what we think.  If we haven't thought about a subject – or even if we have thought about it only a little – we are not likely to get very far in writing about it.  Most so-called writer's block is not caused by an inability to express ourselves but by an absence of something to say.  Student essays often become repetitious, wordy, and boring not so much because of deficiencies in the student's writing skills as because of huge gaps in the student's thinking – gaps that he or she tries to fill in with padding and repetition.

Therefore, instructors of writing place considerable emphasis on defining the point via a thesis sentence, outlining the main ideas to be presented, listing details to support the ideas, and so on.  All of this presumes that the student has thought through the topic and is now ready to write the essay.  All that students need to do is to arrange what is already in their heads into an organized and coherent presentation. Unfortunately, that is often not the case.  Though the students may believe that they know what they are thinking, the thoughts are actually muddled and, in some cases, nonexistent.  Even when the writer starts out with what appears to be a "great idea," a mental brick wall suddenly appears after one or two paragraphs.

What many people fail to recognize is that writing is not just a means of expressing thoughts; it is also a means of discovering and stimulating them.  We can write to discover what we are thinking.  Silly as that sounds – after all, don't we know what our thoughts are? – we are not always aware of what our ideas are.  The brain is a very complex organ, and the ideas we have in our mental mixmaster are, at any given time, jumbled up with sensations of the moment, memories, concerns about tomorrow, and a veritable hodgepodge of thoughts that haven't the remotest connection to the task at hand.  On the periphery of the part of our brain that is trying to focus on writing are thoughts about tonight's dinner, an errand to be done later, a conversation we had a few minutes earlier, and so on.  In the midst of these distractions, the half-formed (dare I say, half-baked?) thoughts that will constitute our essay give the illusion of completeness and coherence, but it is only an illusion.  We need to write to find out what we are really thinking , to disassociate the topic from the distractions.

I call this process the externalizing of thoughts.  I firmly believe that we come to know what we are thinking – and to expand upon it – by writing it down, and I have evidence to support that concept.  At the level of speech, who hasn't experienced the sensation of coming to better understand a feeling or an idea by talking about it?  The mere act of voicing the feeling or idea gives it greater clarity.  At a very simple level of writing, who doesn't create lists to remember things?  We know full well that, despite the remarkable capacity of the human brain, unless these things are "externalized," they may be lost in the mental labyrinth, and thus forgotten.  At a more complex level, people who are faced with a difficult decision sometimes write the pros and cons in two columns on a piece of paper; seeing them externalized in this manner gives greater clarity to the decision-making process.

Thus, besides thinking before we write, we may write to find out what we are thinking.  In some contexts (such as problem-solving), this is an end in itself; in others, it may be a means to an end – a way to get started on what will eventually become a structured essay.  At this "discovery" stage of writing, we may ramble, and that's okay.  We are not interested in drawing the map yet; we are interested in exploring the territory so that we can draw the map later.

Some warnings are in order.  Even at this casual stage of writing, it is unwise to allow ourselves to be utterly sloppy and unmindful of correct grammar and sentence structure.  To obsess about correctness when our principal purpose is to externalize our ideas may, of course, inhibit the free flow of thought; however, if we indulge too much in sloppy writing at the "free writing" stage, it can become a habit.  We must develop – even in our most casual writing – some balance between getting our ideas out and expressing them in reasonably well-structured and correct sentences.  We must also be aware that some, perhaps much, of what we write when we are "writing to think" will need to be discarded later.  We will inevitably write thoughts that are not relevant or are duplications, and we must be willing to eliminate irrelevancies and repetitions.

Above all, we must recognize that, valuable as it is to write so that we can find out what we are thinking, this is the beginning of the process and not the end.  Every writing teacher has seen essays in which the student has never gone beyond some sort of stream-of-consciousness rambling and has presented that as a finished essay.  Lacking control and structure, such essays read more like stream of unconsciousness than coherent thought.  The writer may have covered the territory but hasn't given the reader a map to follow.

With experience, most writers learn when it is time to stop writing to think and to start writing to really write – to commence, if you will, writing "for real."  This is the moment when they cease writing for themselves and start writing for the reader.  That moment may come when they begin to see some structure to their ideas, when previously disconnected ideas begin to gel into a coherent unit, with logical subdivisions.  Or it may come in an "Aha" experience – a sort of epiphany in which the writer, amid all the scribbling, hits upon a single thought that pulls everything together and says, "Aha!  That's what I'm really trying to say.  That's my main idea."  Many a fine thesis sentence has been born in that moment – not before all the scribbling began but as a result of the scribbling.

Many a writer has agonized for hours trying to outline ideas without really knowing what these ideas are.  Others have plunged headlong into last-draft-first approach on the false assumption that they know what they are thinking.  One cannot draw a map of unexplored territory, and, if one goes into unexplored territory without a map, one is likely to get lost.  Writing to think explores the territory.  Once we have done that, we are prepared to create the map for other travelers (our readers) to follow.