The Topography of Thought Edition

Steph Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote The Organizing Edition and The McLuhan Edition, among others.

Steph here. The other day, I read a research paper that explored what our writing styles reveal about our thinking. Or more specifically, whether our writing styles could be markers of success.

To study this, Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger and Columbia Business School’s Olivier Toubia used natural language processing to evaluate 40,000 college application essays, tracking their indicators against the students’ future academic records. 

Why is this interesting?

The researchers discovered that beyond vocabularies or even the content of the essays, the way students organized their ideas revealed something about their ability to succeed. They named this the “topography of thought.”

A few points stood out in their study. First, some students were able to cover much more ground—different ideas, topics, and themes—within a limited word count. Here’s Berger explaining it in an interview:

If you want to use an analogy here, you can almost think about going for a run. Someone can go for a run and go all the way around the city, or they can go for the same number of miles, but just go around the block a number of times. In both cases, they did the same distance, but they covered more ground in one than the other. 

Their second discovery was about the speed with which the students moved through ideas. The most successful were able to cover a wide swath of topics more efficiently, in incremental steps, rather than leaping all over the place. Here’s Berger again: 

Think about the numbers arrayed on a circular clock. You could cover a lot of ground by moving in a circle, (e.g., going from 12 to one to two to three to four) or by traversing the same ground but going from like 12 to six to one to seven to three to 11. You’ve covered the same amount of ground, but you’ve taken a much longer route between each individual point.

It made me think about how my own mind worked in relation to all this.

For example, “Visioning” comes easy to me. Listening to Berger talking about his research, I immediately drew all kinds of connections between his ideas and my own experiences—from the first time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, to the time I helped a friend with his business paper in college, to conversations with those practical types of adults who would always ask me what I was going to do with that English degree.

On the other hand, I know I need to exercise more discipline when it comes to taking incremental steps as I explain my ideas. I remember once, in a beginner’s improv class, our frustrated teacher Courtney told us to partner up and tell a story together, line by line. Our job was to simply narrate tiny, sequenced details because we were struggling with how to make logical, incremental moves, which is essential to storytelling and being funny. So if one person said, “I put on my Adidas,” the second person would say, “and double-knotted the laces,” not “and walked to the mailbox.” (It’s harder than it sounds when you’re making stuff up on the spot.)

But back to Berger and Toubia’s study. Some creative types will read this and think “Yeah, obviously, this is how it works—you generate content or ideas, then you shape them. You freewrite, then you edit. What’s so revelatory about that?” But I do think it’s meaningful to have scalable, objective evidence supporting our intuitions. To have what we know in our gut translated into concrete, data-driven insights, that we can then apply back in our daily lives. Like, say, when we want to write a Substack explainer about an interesting study we read recently. (SB)