I can understand someone not having an inner voice, but I can’t see how writing is possible without inner speech. Otherwise, how can you have thoughts prior to writing them down?
Also note that the article is titled inner speech, not inner voice.
Consider that you've created an infinite regress problem. One might just as well as how inner speech is possible without preceding inner speech - clearly it must be possible for speech, whether inner, outer, oral or written to be formed from a non-verbal antecedent some way or other.
If you accept that, then there's no particular reason to think that it must be inherently necessary for writing to have a verbal antecedent rather than "hooking right into" the same non-verbal antecedent.
The conscious experience of inner voice/speece/eye/nose/whatever is not really saying something about how the rest of the brain functions. Almost everything anyone does is indeed not projected in inner mind before being executed. The subjective experience is a post-hoc narrative of what the mind did, not really a part of the planning process itself. Think about running in a dense forest for example. There's no way to plan with inner mind where to direct your eye muscles first and then having received the visual input, plan with inner mind where to put your feet on the ground to not trip on a rock or root.
And anyway, why would that make any more sense? How would you plan the internal voice in order to produce it? An inner-inner-voice? That would need an inner-inner-inner voice?
It sounds like you have the homunculus idea of how human brain works. But this idea is nonsensical...
Can you elaborate why you think it doesn't, instead of writing single sentence replies?
Only half joking. I'm always impressed by those ancient people who could write long letters by hand in beautiful orthography, composing complex texts and make them just flow linearly. I'm sure here and there there would be a rewriting step involved but that can't have been always the case; there was surely practical pressure to get the output right at first try.
Perhaps this skill could be trained but perhaps it also leverages the ability to tap into your inner voice and inner speech
yeah; doesn't that basically mean you have to have "inner speech"?
So when I have something to talk about I have the idea in my head, then I have to translate it to written or oral medium. Sometimes it's faulty and I use a different language for certain words, because they convey a more nuanced meaning that better corresponds to my idea, and I have a hard time finding the right word or phrase in the language I need to express myself with.
Inside my head I sometimes have inner speech, sometimes I just have a vivid imagination, sometimes it's concepts, and sometimes it's a mix of it all. For example, my first two paragraphs were translation from concepts, while the first line of this one came more from inner speech (half in Catalan, half in English), and this phrase has started as a mix of concept and inner speech.
Not using inner speech as my main medium also means that sometimes I find hard to understand puns that derive from pronunciation, if they come in the written form. When I read I don't imagine the sounds in my head, so I don't "hear" the words and the puns are missed.