Cal Newport started using Roam Research for non-academic note-taking, likes working with it and says there is something to the non-hierarchical linking. It shouldn't be surprising that a productive computer scientist very familiar with graph theory and who is trying out a Zettelkasten should remark that there is something "going on here"--I hope that this leads to a mathematical characterization myself.
I think that he either misrepresents Sönke Ahrens, or oversimplifies what Ahrens actually wrote about the Zettelkasten as a starting point for writing. Ahrens doesn't say that Zettelkasten makes writing easy. That's an oversimplification that Cal Newport might have decided was strictly misleading but appropriate for his audience (disrespectful if true) or he glossed over Ahrens's book. Then Newport applies Modus Tollens to Ahrens, who introduces a bottom-up method of writing using the notes of a Zettelkasten.. Newport says, "that's not how writing works and it's not how I write." Exactly: it's another method of iterating towards a finished product. Experience writing is good--this shouldn't be discounted, but Arhens's approach stands or falls on its own. The Three Dicta of @Sociopoetic are helpful in this regard.
What did Ahrens say?
He says that the Zettel is the shipping container of academic writing. Every note has the same format and goes into the same repository. If the import of this analogy isn't grasped, one might think Ahrens suggests that Zettelkasten makes writing easy.
He says that the end of reading, attending lectures and seminars, etc., is your own writing. In Aristotelian terms, writing is the final cause of all of these activities.
He identifies writing with thinking and suggests that unless one writes efficiently as one reads, listens, etc., one isn't thinking. Thinking academically perhaps, or at least thinking that writing is the reason one does anything.
He says that the Zettelkasten removes the dreaded blank page from the writing process. Since writing is rewriting, the writing has already begun within the Zettelkasten, therefore no blank page.. Enough to generate outlines, rewrite, cite, etc. Ahrens describes a Kaizen approach to writing, with each Zettel representing a small step--small enough not to trigger the amygdala, unlike the blank page, the hunt for a topic and a priori top down structure.
Okay, Ahrens doesn't mention Kaizen, but erring in the direction of Kaizen is a better oversimplification than the straw man that the Zettelkasten makes writing easy. Also, Ahrens is critical of the standard academic approach to research writing, which he documents. Cal Newport probably didn't want to get into this.
I have more respect for Arhens the more I read him. (I lost more of my comment again. Too late to reconstruct.)
(edited the "athens", cause this post is to golden for a chink. Lovingly, @Sascha )
Post edited by Sascha on
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction said:
I think that he either misrepresents Sönke Athens, or oversimplifies what Ahrens actually wrote about the Zettelkasten as a starting point for writing. Athens doesn't say that Zettelkasten makes writing easy.
And I think, I have to reread his book, because this is one of the main points I got from it. I remember, that he at least suggests, that if you took smart notes over the course of a semester, the next essay will practically write itself. Sadly I can not rely on useful notes of this book. I read it at a time, where I switched apps and techniques kind of weekly so they are probably lost in transition.
The name is Ahrens.
I think his scepticism is on point considering that he hasn't tried it yet. He seems a lot more open to this way of storing notes then me (when i started). It felt like a radical change to me when i first heard of it.
The book is very objective. There are only one or two very short sentences where he implies his smart notes are better than alternatives. That's hardly false advertisement.
@ZettelDistraction said:
.......
What did Athens say?
......
He identifies writing with thinking and suggests that unless one writes efficiently as one reads, listens, etc., one isn't thinking. Thinking academically perhaps, or at least thinking that writing is the reason one does anything.
I really like this comment. Thinking is so essential to "writing", at least in the way that I understand that word, that the two are inseparable. By thinking I have in mind a) initial processing of what is being said, b) pondering metaphors, logic and meaning, c) examining arguments and counter-arguments, d) examining implications, etc. It is a deep process that needs time to produce results.
One needs to be thinking when reading (how else do you understand what the author is saying?) and when extracting information into a zettel. One also needs to be thinking (furiously) when writing/composing some article or book or theses or report (which is an entirely separate matter from writing zettels). My thinking fully matures during the process of writing an engineering report or article, so that finishing the report writing is also the culmination of the thinking process. It can be both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.
@GeoEng51 said: "Thinking is so essential to "writing", at least in the way that I understand that word, that the two are inseparable. "
In an academic context, I've been struck recently by the following observations by scholars across different fields that reinforce your conclusion:
Here's Deborah Williams, Creative Writing/Literature professor (NYU Abu Dhabi):
"At least once a semester, I have a conversation that goes something like this: a colleague looks at her students’ essays and moans, 'They just can’t write.' When I ask how much class time she spends talking about student writing, I’m told quite sharply that 'there is way too much material to cover to spend time on that, so I just give them a handout. I mean, aren’t they supposed to learn this stuff in first-year comp?'
And there it is: the paradox of student writing. Bad student writing will make you moan, but writing isn’t as important as content coverage. Writing is 'stuff' that should have been triaged by first-year comp classes, which can apparently be replaced by the compositional Band-Aid of a handout" (Williams "How").
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, founder of the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity writes of her academic clients:
"Many of us hold an incredibly limiting set of beliefs about the writing process, the relationship between our thoughts and the physical act of writing, and what it takes to sit down and write. When I ask people to describe their writing process, what often surfaces is the idea that writing is what happens AFTER they have read everything there is to read, clearly and thoroughly worked out an idea in their heads, and have large blocks of time to empty a fully-developed idea onto the page (or into the computer). In other words, "writing” is simply the physical act a scholar engages in after she’s gotten everything figured out internally. Hand-in-hand with this exclusively mechanical understanding of writing is the sense that particular emotional states are a prerequisite for writing. In other words, people frequently tell me they need to FEEL _________ (inspired, excited, energized, confident, clear, etc.) before they can sit down and write. As you can imagine, people who need to feel perfectly inspired and have a fully formed article in their head before sitting down at their desk rarely write."
REFS
Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. "Writing Is Thinking." Monday Motivator, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity. Email. 7 June 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021.
[Ahrens] says that the Zettel is the shipping container of academic writing. Every note has the same format and goes into the same repository. If the import of this analogy isn't grasped, one might think Athens suggests that Zettelkasten makes writing easy.
It's been a while (I think two years) since I read Ahrens' book, but anecdotally this metaphor is something that stuck with me. As my ZK grows (and broadens to include other topics beyond my academic work), the usefulness of the image has increased. The Zettel isn't about the ideas in the "shipping container" getting to their final destination (a reader of a work) --- that's the task of later writing. Instead, the Zettel delivers the goods to that point. In other words, if the Zettel is the shipping container, then switching from note-taking to long-form writing is the "store."
Okay, Ahrens doesn't mention Kaizen, but erring in the direction of Kaizen is a better oversimplification than the straw man that the Zettelkasten makes writing easy.
True. In my opinion Kaizen is also a useful concept when thinking about our notes. Slowly improving both the content of the ZK and the content of individual notes is a hard and never-ending process. In support of the idea that writing is a form of thinking, though, kaizen applied to a ZK strikes me as a way to clarify our thinking over time.
This is literally a life hacker hot take on zettelkasten from someone who doesn't even use zettelkasten. Why am I supposed to care again? Cuz "deep work?" Ugh, I'm so bored of all these dudes.
Cal Newport mentions that he is using Roam Research for his non-academic note taking (for New Yorker magazine articles, the seemingly impromptu speech at the next soiree on the occasion of a forthcoming podcast, holding forth at the Algonquin Round Table--the sorts of things adults do).
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I liked this because it galvanized me to articulate my thoughts on this, which goes in this order:
Brain is limited as a system, so we take notes as a way to cognitively offload information that we come across and don't have the ability to remember.
We can take these notes, but once we have a sufficient amount of them, we need some sort of organization system that allows us to purposely revisit relevant notes to whatever we are thinking
Zettelkasten is a good system for doing so because it also allows us to easily create a map of the information we've come across on any given topic. It does this through atomizing ideas and creating connections between them
This allows us to see our existing understanding on a topic when it comes down to writing about a topic. Because the ideas have also been atomized, they can be remixed and probed for non-obvious connections. What this does is make choosing what to write about and how you might go about doing so much easier than starting from a blank page.
It sounds like to me that he is just prejudging this method without having actually implemented it and used it for some time.
@taurusnoises said: This is literally a life hacker hot take on zettelkasten from someone who doesn't even use zettelkasten. Why am I supposed to care again? Cuz "deep work?" Ugh, I'm so bored of all these dudes.
No, it isn't. It is the opinion of a
established scientist,
very productive person,
a thought leader.
His scepticism is justified considering because the amount of super systems that promise to make writing (or anything) easy and you just have to do X steps is huge and almost all of them don't hold up to that promise.
It is worth to take criticism seriously like @ZettelDistraction did. It is a learning opportunity worth taking.
@Sascha, thank you for saying so and for correcting the cellphone-generated typo "Athens" for "Ahrens"--for that I cannot thank you enough. (There are a couple left.)
I revised the Zettel template based on Cal Newport's skeptical criticism of Ahrens (that Ahrens claims that the Zettelkasten makes writing easy--this is the wrong takeaway from Ahrens), a re-reading of Ahrens, and on the Three Dicta of @Sociopoetic. The Zettel template was written (and rewritten) directly for "publication," which in this case means committing a file on Github, but for long-form projects I work differently.
In the revised Zettel Template I wrote some additional remarks, which I will repeat here, on the three descriptive categories of notes in Ahrens: fleeting, permanent and project notes. Fleeting notes are to be discarded after being recast for inclusion in the Zettelkasten as permanent notes. Permanent notes are Zettels and Zettels are permanent notes, only they aren't immutable as their name misleadingly suggests. They can be revised. The point of elevating the fleeting note to the status of a category is to emphasize that Ahrens advises reading with paper and pen in hand, and advises against highlighting or marking up books and leaving slips of paper around. Ahrens also expects fleeting notes to be written judiciously on the spot, rewritten as Zettels (if useful) and discarded after at most a day or two.† So-called literature notes are mentioned by Ahrens in passing. These optional notes either reside in a citation database such as Zotero, or as permanent notes (Zettels) in the Zettelkasten.
As for project notes, Ahrens mentions them as one of the three types of notes to be distinguished clearly in order for the Zettelkasten to achieve a critical mass.‡ However, project notes are mentioned exactly once in "How to Take Smart Notes" and are never mentioned again.
The descriptive categories of Ahrens have led some readers to fetishize fleeting, permanent and literature notes. Online discussion of these categories tends toward interminable rumination over their presumed deep, metaphysical meaning, or to casual claims that "people are overthinking the Zettelkasten Method" without articulating exactly or at least helpfully where the overthinking lies. I hope this brief interpretation is sound enough to preempt such confusion.
Incidentally, the new avatar is one of many diagrams emerging from a project originating in my own Zettelkasten (and under its direction--本当!). When the project is ready (and I can establish priority or else find that someone else beat me to it), I'll say what it is.
† Or flushed as in the Fleet Enema—apologies I cannot rid myself of this asshole-ciation or prevent myself from mentioning it—I never got the hang of "adulting." However, for me this image is a memorable mnemonic in the recommended ISO-standard register.
‡ The critical mass is attained at the magic moment when the Zettelkasten undergoes a phase transition from a mundane folder or file cabinet to a full-fledged communication partner, if you believe Niklas Luhmann in Communicating with Slip Boxes: an Empirical Account. Ahrens is more cautious when he writes that the Zettelkasten is like a communication partner. I of course throw all caution to the wind: in my case, the Zettelkasten has taken it upon itself to direct my work, and informs me that the initial phase transition is only one of an infinite series of phase transitions extending its vision beyond the endless cognitive vistas already in its grasp. Apparently it has a growth mindset.
Post edited by ZettelDistraction on
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
REFS
Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. "Writing Is Thinking." Monday Motivator, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity. Email. 7 June 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021.
I googled this reference and apparently it was published as a blog post at least a decade before: "Writing IS Thinking", 19 July 2010.
This is a theme that never gets old, as can be seen by searching for "writing is thinking" OR "writing as thinking" in Google Scholar, which returns at least two dozen articles and books with that title dating back decades—an early one is in College English in 1967. The same is true of a search for "writing is problem solving" OR "writing as problem solving" in Google Scholar. There are also many relevant articles in the journal Teaching Philosophy (just search for "writing" in the title of articles in that journal in Google Scholar), and much of the literature on teaching argumentation is also relevant.
In my own experience, there is no end to learning how to think better by writing, and writing in a personal hypertext system helps.
Recently, I read the book Too Much to Know, Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, by Ann M. Blair, where she demonstrates that the need to store, sort, select, and summarize what others have written, as well as what we think, has been going for centuries.
It was humbling for me to learn that the writing-is-thinking-note-making-linking-indexing-compiling-structuring-categorizing-etc techniques were invented long ago. Centuries. Common books, compilations, zettelkastens, tags, encyclopedias, directories, indexing systems, library cards, MOCs, etc. - these are all ancient tools, constantly perfected by technology.
But it probably wasn't until the spread of mass higher education that the teaching of writing as thinking became so widespread, along with dozens of books and professional articles on the subject! And now podcasts and YouTube videos, etc.
Comments
Cal Newport started using Roam Research for non-academic note-taking, likes working with it and says there is something to the non-hierarchical linking. It shouldn't be surprising that a productive computer scientist very familiar with graph theory and who is trying out a Zettelkasten should remark that there is something "going on here"--I hope that this leads to a mathematical characterization myself.
I think that he either misrepresents Sönke Ahrens, or oversimplifies what Ahrens actually wrote about the Zettelkasten as a starting point for writing. Ahrens doesn't say that Zettelkasten makes writing easy. That's an oversimplification that Cal Newport might have decided was strictly misleading but appropriate for his audience (disrespectful if true) or he glossed over Ahrens's book. Then Newport applies Modus Tollens to Ahrens, who introduces a bottom-up method of writing using the notes of a Zettelkasten.. Newport says, "that's not how writing works and it's not how I write." Exactly: it's another method of iterating towards a finished product. Experience writing is good--this shouldn't be discounted, but Arhens's approach stands or falls on its own. The Three Dicta of @Sociopoetic are helpful in this regard.
What did Ahrens say?
He says that the Zettel is the shipping container of academic writing. Every note has the same format and goes into the same repository. If the import of this analogy isn't grasped, one might think Ahrens suggests that Zettelkasten makes writing easy.
He says that the end of reading, attending lectures and seminars, etc., is your own writing. In Aristotelian terms, writing is the final cause of all of these activities.
He identifies writing with thinking and suggests that unless one writes efficiently as one reads, listens, etc., one isn't thinking. Thinking academically perhaps, or at least thinking that writing is the reason one does anything.
He says that the Zettelkasten removes the dreaded blank page from the writing process. Since writing is rewriting, the writing has already begun within the Zettelkasten, therefore no blank page.. Enough to generate outlines, rewrite, cite, etc. Ahrens describes a Kaizen approach to writing, with each Zettel representing a small step--small enough not to trigger the amygdala, unlike the blank page, the hunt for a topic and a priori top down structure.
Okay, Ahrens doesn't mention Kaizen, but erring in the direction of Kaizen is a better oversimplification than the straw man that the Zettelkasten makes writing easy. Also, Ahrens is critical of the standard academic approach to research writing, which he documents. Cal Newport probably didn't want to get into this.
I have more respect for Arhens the more I read him. (I lost more of my comment again. Too late to reconstruct.)
(edited the "athens", cause this post is to golden for a chink. Lovingly, @Sascha )
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
And I think, I have to reread his book, because this is one of the main points I got from it. I remember, that he at least suggests, that if you took smart notes over the course of a semester, the next essay will practically write itself. Sadly I can not rely on useful notes of this book. I read it at a time, where I switched apps and techniques kind of weekly so they are probably lost in transition.
The name is Ahrens.
I think his scepticism is on point considering that he hasn't tried it yet. He seems a lot more open to this way of storing notes then me (when i started). It felt like a radical change to me when i first heard of it.
The book is very objective. There are only one or two very short sentences where he implies his smart notes are better than alternatives. That's hardly false advertisement.
my first Zettel uid: 202008120915
@zk_1000 Autocorrect introduces errors that are hard to undo in the wee hours.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I really like this comment. Thinking is so essential to "writing", at least in the way that I understand that word, that the two are inseparable. By thinking I have in mind a) initial processing of what is being said, b) pondering metaphors, logic and meaning, c) examining arguments and counter-arguments, d) examining implications, etc. It is a deep process that needs time to produce results.
One needs to be thinking when reading (how else do you understand what the author is saying?) and when extracting information into a zettel. One also needs to be thinking (furiously) when writing/composing some article or book or theses or report (which is an entirely separate matter from writing zettels). My thinking fully matures during the process of writing an engineering report or article, so that finishing the report writing is also the culmination of the thinking process. It can be both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.
In an academic context, I've been struck recently by the following observations by scholars across different fields that reinforce your conclusion:
Here's Deborah Williams, Creative Writing/Literature professor (NYU Abu Dhabi):
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, founder of the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity writes of her academic clients:
REFS
Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. "Writing Is Thinking." Monday Motivator, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity. Email. 7 June 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021.
Williams, Deborah L. "How First-Year Comp Can Save the World." Inside Higher Ed. 2 Jan. 2020.. Accessed 3 Jan. 2020.
Started ZK 4.2018. "The path is at your feet, see? Now carry on."
Thanks for the shout-out.
It's been a while (I think two years) since I read Ahrens' book, but anecdotally this metaphor is something that stuck with me. As my ZK grows (and broadens to include other topics beyond my academic work), the usefulness of the image has increased. The Zettel isn't about the ideas in the "shipping container" getting to their final destination (a reader of a work) --- that's the task of later writing. Instead, the Zettel delivers the goods to that point. In other words, if the Zettel is the shipping container, then switching from note-taking to long-form writing is the "store."
True. In my opinion Kaizen is also a useful concept when thinking about our notes. Slowly improving both the content of the ZK and the content of individual notes is a hard and never-ending process. In support of the idea that writing is a form of thinking, though, kaizen applied to a ZK strikes me as a way to clarify our thinking over time.
This is literally a life hacker hot take on zettelkasten from someone who doesn't even use zettelkasten. Why am I supposed to care again? Cuz "deep work?" Ugh, I'm so bored of all these dudes.
Cal Newport mentions that he is using Roam Research for his non-academic note taking (for New Yorker magazine articles, the seemingly impromptu speech at the next soiree on the occasion of a forthcoming podcast, holding forth at the Algonquin Round Table--the sorts of things adults do).
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I liked this because it galvanized me to articulate my thoughts on this, which goes in this order:
Brain is limited as a system, so we take notes as a way to cognitively offload information that we come across and don't have the ability to remember.
We can take these notes, but once we have a sufficient amount of them, we need some sort of organization system that allows us to purposely revisit relevant notes to whatever we are thinking
Zettelkasten is a good system for doing so because it also allows us to easily create a map of the information we've come across on any given topic. It does this through atomizing ideas and creating connections between them
This allows us to see our existing understanding on a topic when it comes down to writing about a topic. Because the ideas have also been atomized, they can be remixed and probed for non-obvious connections. What this does is make choosing what to write about and how you might go about doing so much easier than starting from a blank page.
It sounds like to me that he is just prejudging this method without having actually implemented it and used it for some time.
No, it isn't. It is the opinion of a
His scepticism is justified considering because the amount of super systems that promise to make writing (or anything) easy and you just have to do X steps is huge and almost all of them don't hold up to that promise.
It is worth to take criticism seriously like @ZettelDistraction did. It is a learning opportunity worth taking.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha, thank you for saying so and for correcting the cellphone-generated typo "Athens" for "Ahrens"--for that I cannot thank you enough. (There are a couple left.)
I revised the Zettel template based on Cal Newport's skeptical criticism of Ahrens (that Ahrens claims that the Zettelkasten makes writing easy--this is the wrong takeaway from Ahrens), a re-reading of Ahrens, and on the Three Dicta of @Sociopoetic. The Zettel template was written (and rewritten) directly for "publication," which in this case means committing a file on Github, but for long-form projects I work differently.
In the revised Zettel Template I wrote some additional remarks, which I will repeat here, on the three descriptive categories of notes in Ahrens: fleeting, permanent and project notes. Fleeting notes are to be discarded after being recast for inclusion in the Zettelkasten as permanent notes. Permanent notes are Zettels and Zettels are permanent notes, only they aren't immutable as their name misleadingly suggests. They can be revised. The point of elevating the fleeting note to the status of a category is to emphasize that Ahrens advises reading with paper and pen in hand, and advises against highlighting or marking up books and leaving slips of paper around. Ahrens also expects fleeting notes to be written judiciously on the spot, rewritten as Zettels (if useful) and discarded after at most a day or two.† So-called literature notes are mentioned by Ahrens in passing. These optional notes either reside in a citation database such as Zotero, or as permanent notes (Zettels) in the Zettelkasten.
As for project notes, Ahrens mentions them as one of the three types of notes to be distinguished clearly in order for the Zettelkasten to achieve a critical mass.‡ However, project notes are mentioned exactly once in "How to Take Smart Notes" and are never mentioned again.
The descriptive categories of Ahrens have led some readers to fetishize fleeting, permanent and literature notes. Online discussion of these categories tends toward interminable rumination over their presumed deep, metaphysical meaning, or to casual claims that "people are overthinking the Zettelkasten Method" without articulating exactly or at least helpfully where the overthinking lies. I hope this brief interpretation is sound enough to preempt such confusion.
Incidentally, the new avatar is one of many diagrams emerging from a project originating in my own Zettelkasten (and under its direction--本当!). When the project is ready (and I can establish priority or else find that someone else beat me to it), I'll say what it is.
† Or flushed as in the Fleet Enema—apologies I cannot rid myself of this asshole-ciation or prevent myself from mentioning it—I never got the hang of "adulting." However, for me this image is a memorable mnemonic in the recommended ISO-standard register.
‡ The critical mass is attained at the magic moment when the Zettelkasten undergoes a phase transition from a mundane folder or file cabinet to a full-fledged communication partner, if you believe Niklas Luhmann in Communicating with Slip Boxes: an Empirical Account. Ahrens is more cautious when he writes that the Zettelkasten is like a communication partner. I of course throw all caution to the wind: in my case, the Zettelkasten has taken it upon itself to direct my work, and informs me that the initial phase transition is only one of an infinite series of phase transitions extending its vision beyond the endless cognitive vistas already in its grasp. Apparently it has a growth mindset.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@Sascha I'm perfectly OK feeling the way I do, and do not feel cheated out of a learning opportunity. There are plenty to go around.
@ZettelDistraction what\where is this, “Three Dicta of @Sociopoetic”?
The Three Dicta of @Sociopoetic first appeared in a forum post of January 27, 2020 that was promoted to the blog the next day.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Great, Thanks. Love this Forum!
@Phil said:
I googled this reference and apparently it was published as a blog post at least a decade before: "Writing IS Thinking", 19 July 2010.
This is a theme that never gets old, as can be seen by searching for "writing is thinking" OR "writing as thinking" in Google Scholar, which returns at least two dozen articles and books with that title dating back decades—an early one is in College English in 1967. The same is true of a search for "writing is problem solving" OR "writing as problem solving" in Google Scholar. There are also many relevant articles in the journal Teaching Philosophy (just search for "writing" in the title of articles in that journal in Google Scholar), and much of the literature on teaching argumentation is also relevant.
In my own experience, there is no end to learning how to think better by writing, and writing in a personal hypertext system helps.
Recently, I read the book Too Much to Know, Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, by Ann M. Blair, where she demonstrates that the need to store, sort, select, and summarize what others have written, as well as what we think, has been going for centuries.
It was humbling for me to learn that the writing-is-thinking-note-making-linking-indexing-compiling-structuring-categorizing-etc techniques were invented long ago. Centuries. Common books, compilations, zettelkastens, tags, encyclopedias, directories, indexing systems, library cards, MOCs, etc. - these are all ancient tools, constantly perfected by technology.
@gdigesu said:
But it probably wasn't until the spread of mass higher education that the teaching of writing as thinking became so widespread, along with dozens of books and professional articles on the subject! And now podcasts and YouTube videos, etc.