I find if I&#x27;m struggling to come up with a word it&#x27;s because I&#x27;ve lost the conversational flow of the sentence I&#x27;m writing, or of the point I&#x27;m trying to make. If I try to describe it out loud to an imaginary or, ideally, a real person, I&#x27;m usually then able to convey what I was trying to say, though usually by restructuring the form of the argument, rather than by conveniently finding the right word.<p>Often complex thoughts come to me not as fully constructed sentences. I might forget how I intended to finish a sentence by the time I&#x27;m three words in, lost in a forest of opportunities for converting the faint cognitive signal to an established element of prose.<p>I find I am better able to articulate a problem after I&#x27;ve explained it to a number of people on different occasions. The first person I explain it to won&#x27;t have the foggiest what I&#x27;m talking about, probably because I&#x27;m constantly grasping for words, but to the fifth person the problem will seem trivial.