In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.