Language is often like a second language to me. I’ve long struggled to articulate what I’m feeling, even to myself. While that has gotten easier over time with practice and lots of emotional work, it is still difficult when I’m feeling overwhelmed. For some reason, I’ve generally found writing easier than speaking. Here are some possible reasons as to why.
- I have plenty of time to figure out how I want it to come out. For the most part, ideas have flowed out of me pretty easily through writing. In contrast, learning to speak as well as I can now has taken a lot of work over many years. Even now, I can still usually write better than I speak, and some days it’s as if I’ve forgotten how to speak entirely while my writing abilities are still solid. For whatever reason, I’m far less likely to get finger tied when typing than tongue tied when talking. At least some of that comes from having much more time to think of what I’m going to write than I have when thinking about what to say.
- I can rewrite something as much as I like until I feel satisfied with it. This mainly applies to emails, texts, social media posts, and other forms of written communication. Before I send a message, I can take as much time as I need to make it come out right. In some cases, I can even edit a message after putting it out there if I see an error, think of a better way to say it, or realize I forgot to include an important part. That’s something that can’t be done with words that have been spoken aloud, and it’s one of my favorite things about writing.
- Written words are easier to understand than spoken words. How many times have you misheard, misunderstood, or simply missed what someone said? That’s happened to me more times than I can count, and it seems to happen to others nearly every time I say something. That’s one of the worst parts of speaking. One of the best parts about writing is that that is almost impossible by its very nature. Being able to see a written message allows anyone who reads it to go over it as many times as necessary to understand it without requiring any more effort from the person who wrote that message. That’s why misunderstandings, missing an important bit of information, and so on are less likely with reading than with speaking.
- Written words stick around long after they’re written down. One of the biggest problems with speaking is that spoken words fade away as soon as they’re said, so if someone didn’t hear or understand a message the first time, the only way they can experience it again is if the person who said it repeats it at least once. I generally hate repeating myself and find it increasingly more draining the more someone asks me to do it. That’s why I’d rather write a message one time and show it to many people with hardly any effort rather than explain the same thing to F that I’ve already explained to A, B, C, D, and E, etc. I’ve found this quite helpful when letting others know I feel upset, such as the many blog posts I’ve written about my dog Sawyer’s death or the note I showed some nearby friends shortly after my grandmother died. Those were much less tiring than having to say the same thing repeatedly to many different people.