I was first exposed to this idea at The Business of Software conference in 2017. Joanna Wiebe gave a talk about copywriting for SaaS businesses. She’s an advertising copy writer, and the talk is mostly about that. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but near the end, she said something that astonished me.

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Like many people I write to think. And, it helps. I set out with only inklings of an idea and by the time I am done, I usually have a coherent a complete thought. The writing contains it, but it doesn’t communicate it.

There’s a difference between writing to think and writing to communicate and I finally understand that.

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The times that I’ve made the least progress on writing was when I was trying to do it on the side or as a hobby. This isn’t because of the relative amount of time I devoted to it. It was because I treated it as something I would try to fit in, and it never did. I could always find something else to do.

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I’ve stared at a lot of blank pages. Technically, they were actually blank textareas, but you get the point.

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I found out that I didn’t know how to read or write. This episode will show you how making a change to how I read made it much easier to write.

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I started my blog 17 years ago, but wrote about 9 posts a year. Then, I started doing something that helped me write something I could publish every day.

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