There are good reasons to write without worrying about publishing at all. One reason is that thinking about what will be 'publishable' will most likely greatly distort what you choose to write about.
Applies to most creative activities. It seems that many highly popular creatives were having great fun being creative, and that their audience shares in that enjoyment.
Of course some people would like to be able to support themselves in that way. But, then, it's probably best to let your audience find you first.
Great and short article about the importance of being able to explain something.
Medical students have the phrase
See one,
do one,
teach one,
when it comes to learning a new treatment or diagnostic method. I like that because it has the repetition baked in and each iteration one needs more depth of understanding.
According to the article it sounds useful to add a fourth one:
Write it down.
In order to make it more easy to relearn the thing if you forget it.
When I spend time studying a topic, I make PowerPoint/keynote slides. They are better than texts for three reasons.
(1) Slides are more concise, forcing me to digest the material into high level sections.
(2) More diagrams and less text provides motivations and intuitions of the subject. They are therefore easier to teach others or at least hook them to learning more.
(3) I am always ready to give a talk on the subject.
(4) Details or technical notes can be put in the back.
This is great! Another thing I do is use index cards, just like slides. I can put them all out on the floor, and see the flow of logic I want to use. For some reason working with physical cards and stepping away from the computer helps me clarify thoughts.
I agree for the most part, but I've decided markdown is the best for this. Plain text is just easier to link, store, query and markdown can be rendered as slides with little to no effort.
Intuitions are better and more concisely communicated through images and spoken word, rather than written text.
If all technical details are necessary to get the big picture across, then I agree one should move to text and equations. But this is rarely the case (I challenge any text to try to compete with a 3blue1brown video).
Most people are too lazy to read a wall of text. They would rather invite a speaker to go through 20 slides and get the big picture.
Technical details in my opinion are overrated, and should be relegated to computers.
Applies to most creative activities. It seems that many highly popular creatives were having great fun being creative, and that their audience shares in that enjoyment.
Of course some people would like to be able to support themselves in that way. But, then, it's probably best to let your audience find you first.