Why is it so Hard to Criticize Our Own Writing?

Out of interest and sometimes necessity, I write.

I write and share those writings with others. The purpose of my writing is always to convey an idea of some sorts. At its core, the process is about extracting the ideas in my mind and put them in a transferrable format such that others can download the same.

However, the quality and purity of that written word can hinder its alignment power. If you were lucky to run into an excellent writing teacher in your educational journey (as I have), you would know this truth and have a bias on spending more time editing than on a perfect first draft.

Yet, if we understand this to be “the thing” about writing, why is it so hard to do it with high efficacy?

How come I can spot mistakes, weak points and poorly organized ramblings in my peer’s work so much faster than in my own?

I believe the reason is because of the limiting factor that is language. I’ve concluded* that information in our minds lives in a high dimensionality space: richly and unstructured. The process of writing is to compress that information into a sequence of words that can ultimately be unpacked into a near-identical mental representation in your audience’s head. On When is it better to think without words?, Henrik Karlsson eludes to very concept. He highlights extremely accomplished mathematicians who prefer spending hours or even days in their abstract thinking until reaching an acceptable checkpoint to put pen to paper. An anonymous thinker has put it in words far more elegantly:

“Language is a lossy compression algorithm on the human imagination”

If this idea holds for all types of writing then the reason why we can’t criticize our own work starts to take shape!

When we are reading our own writings, being distillations, they’re fragmentarily mirroring the higher dimensionality thoughts already present in our minds, therefore hindering our ability to see its gaps clearly.

Conversely, when we’re reading someone’s else writing, we have zero mental context to the impetus of that work. None of its long meditations, explorations or connections. We do not engage with it having an already well-formed representation of its ideas. We just get the distilled essence and we have to unpack that to judge the ideas on their own merit.

So what is the answer? Like Paul Graham wrote, share drafts with friends who can give you quality feedback!

And get good at self-criticism, this a learnable skill after all. It is so important to be able to forsake our own context to judge our production with fresh eyes so we can sharpen their edges and increase their impact.

This makes you a more persuasive communicator; and who bothers to speak at all expect those that want to be heard?