Silent Speech

Confession time: I have a lousy habit of talking out loud to myself. I'm not referring to angry mumbling, which is a completely different matter. What I mean is that sometimes I will be thinking about a particular subject and, while working it out in my mind, I will talk aloud to myself. Now to others, this probably doesn't look so cool. So what I'd like to do is something that sounds a bit paradoxical: speak silently.

When we (or at least I) think silently, we take mental shortcuts and don't think in full, grammatically and semantically-correct sentences. We tend to hop around from one topic to another, and allow emotions and "tape-playing" to sway our thoughts. That is one big reason why I tend to talk out my thoughts: to expose them to a kind of feedback-test (through my own ears) as to how viable and rational they are. But I don't need to audibly vocalize my thoughts when I do this. To think in a "silent speech" manner would impose the discipline of concentration on thoughts, pushing back unwanted distractions (at least from conscious thinking).

Instead of talking to myself, I need to cultivate the skill of "silent speech", whereby my thoughts are produced within me with the same structure and content that would be acceptable writing or speech, without the mental shortcuts. At first, this would tend to slow down and even hamper my progression of thoughts, but in the end it will be a good exercise that will pay future dividends in my writing, speech, and avoid having people look at me as if I'm crazy!

Silent speech is a form of thinking that I am setting aside time for. I believe that many good writers and speakers already have trained themselves to be good at this, without necessarily knowing what they were doing. I've read that the late prolific writer Isaac Asimov claimed that he was always writing, even when he wasn't physically doing so. He had trained himself to think in a writing-friendly manner, and his memory was such that he could think up long sections of material and then later faithfully reproduce it on paper! I don't know how far I'll be able to go with this, but I do know that it's worth a sustained effort!