"While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying"
About this Quote
The line lands like a quiet rebuke to our romance with productivity. Vos Savant isn’t marveling at the difficulty of multitasking; she’s puncturing the polite fiction that we can “capture” someone’s words while staying fully present with them. The intent is practical, almost domestic: stop pretending note-taking is neutral. It changes the room.
Its subtext is about attention as a scarce resource and listening as an ethical act. Writing doesn’t just siphon cognitive bandwidth; it shifts your posture from participant to stenographer, from human exchange to information extraction. That’s why the sentence is phrased in the second person. “While you’re writing” implicates the reader in a familiar scene: a meeting, a lecture, a tense conversation where the notebook becomes a shield. The speaker’s meaning lives in tone, timing, hesitation, the small recalibrations between sentences. Writing privileges the quotable over the felt.
Context matters: vos Savant’s public persona is built on clear-eyed rationality and an intolerance for lazy thinking. Read through that lens, the quote functions as a miniature lesson in cognitive limits, the kind that plays well in advice columns and boardrooms alike. It’s also a cultural tell. In an era that treats attention as a currency and documentation as proof of seriousness, she’s reminding us that the most important data in a conversation is often the part you can’t transcribe.
Its subtext is about attention as a scarce resource and listening as an ethical act. Writing doesn’t just siphon cognitive bandwidth; it shifts your posture from participant to stenographer, from human exchange to information extraction. That’s why the sentence is phrased in the second person. “While you’re writing” implicates the reader in a familiar scene: a meeting, a lecture, a tense conversation where the notebook becomes a shield. The speaker’s meaning lives in tone, timing, hesitation, the small recalibrations between sentences. Writing privileges the quotable over the felt.
Context matters: vos Savant’s public persona is built on clear-eyed rationality and an intolerance for lazy thinking. Read through that lens, the quote functions as a miniature lesson in cognitive limits, the kind that plays well in advice columns and boardrooms alike. It’s also a cultural tell. In an era that treats attention as a currency and documentation as proof of seriousness, she’s reminding us that the most important data in a conversation is often the part you can’t transcribe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Marilyn
Add to List
