What is writing?

This is not an original thought. I got it from Cassie McDaniel who shared it from a design offsite she held for Medium in 2025.

What is writing, anyway? Is braille writing? Are hieroglyphics writing? Is it writing if it’s in a language you don’t understand? Are icons writing? Are audio stories writing? Where the design team landed was in the bottom left corner of the photo I’m attaching: that writing is the record of an idea, sitting somewhere between a thought and the expression of that thought.

(Link to the original note I got this from, if you happen to have access to it.)

Writing (noun) is the record of an idea, sitting somewhere between a thought and the expression of that thought (where the expression is the thing that gets produced… like an action or a product etc).

Writing (verb) is the process of producing that record. Which is a method of moving from thought to expression. And in the moving, it evolves that thought.

Which is hard! And it makes the writing (n) valuable, and makes the writing (v) valuable.