ABSTRACT
I sit at my desk with my computer monitor before me and my keyboard beneath my hands, writing. What exactly am I doing as my fingers press the keys and my eyes scan the screen? One answer would be that I am attempting to express my ideas in words. If that is the case, I must already know in some fashion what those ideas are, and the activity I am engaged in is a form of translation, a trying-out of different words until I hit upon the ones that match the idea I want to express. Leaving aside the problems raised by the notion of a pre-verbal idea, it may be that what I am engaged in for much of the time that I am writing is not far from this kind of translation. In this case, when I have formed a sentence to my satisfaction the feeling I have is that it encapsulates something I wanted to articulate without at first having the appropriate words, or, more accurately perhaps, without my words possessing the required linear and organized sequence.
