Looking Smart

How do you appear smart? I get this question, in some form or another, often enough. I try very hard not to brag about my abilities, for a variety of reasons, but most sources agree that I’m smarter than the average cyborg. Being the smart guy comes with quite a few perks, and people want to know what my secret is. Why do professors wait to call on me until after other people have struck out, and offer to give me prerequisite overrides to get into accelerated courses? What gives me the uncanny ability to pull bits of trivia about anything? How can I just sit down and write a fully formed essay without any draft process?
Well, to be honest, I don’t know. I’ve tried to distill various answers over the years, but haven’t got anything that anyone can consciously put into action. Given the shifting nature of how we define intelligence, there may never be an answer. Shortest post ever, right? Except I don’t want to leave it at that. That’s a cop out. People want advice on how to improve themselves, to reach the same privilege that I’ve been granted by chance. The least I can do is delve into it a bit.
Sadly, I can’t tell you why I’m able to pull vocabulary and facts out of my brain. I’ve spent more than two decades with it, and it still mystifies me with how it will latch onto things like soldiers’ nicknames for WWI artillery pieces (Miss Minnie Waffer was a popular moniker given by American doughboys to German mortars, a corruption of the German term “Minenwerfer”, or mine-thrower), but drop names and faces into the void (My language professor, for instance, whom I’ve had for nearly a year, is still nameless unless I consult my syllabus). Why does it do this? I don’t know. Is it because I’m brain damaged? Yeah, actually, that would make a lot of sense.
The reason I’m good at writing, for instance, is that most of the time, the words just kind of… come together. In my brain, they have a certain feel to them, like a mental texture. They have a certain, I’m going to say, pull, in one or several directions, depending on context, connotations, mood, and so forth. A word can be heavier or lighter, brighter or darker, pulling the sentence in one direction or another, slowing the sequence of thoughts down or accelerating them. As I reach for them and feel them in my brain, they can bring up other words along with them, like pieces of candy stuck together coming out of a jar. This can continue for entire paragraphs of perfectly formed language, and oftentimes if I allow myself, I wind up writing something entirely different than I had intended when I first went looking. This is actually how most of my posts get written.
I used to think that everyone had this sense about language. I’ve met a few people who I am definitely sure have it. But I’ve also been told that this kind of thinking is actually limited to people with irregular brain patterns. So when people ask me how I write and speak so well, I have to answer that, honestly, I just do. I get an idea of what I want to express, or the impression I want to give, and I find the words that match that description, and see what friends they bring along with them. This ability to write full sentences competently, wedded to a smidgeon of poise and a dash of self confidence, is in my experience all that it takes to write essays, or for that matter, give speeches. 
If there’s a downside to this, it’s that by this point I’m totally dependent on this sense, which can desert me when I start to feel under the weather. This sense tends to be impacted before any other part of my health, and without it I can become quickly helpless, unable to string more than the most basic sentences together, and totally unable to apply any degree of intellectual effort to anything. In extreme cases, I will begin a sentence assured that the words will come to me, and halfway through begin to sputter and stare into space, as in my mind I try to reach for a word or concept that just isn’t quite there.
This sense works best for words, but it can work with ideas too. Ideas, especially things like historical facts, of principles of physics, have a similar shape and pull. Like an online encyclopedia with hyperlinks riddled on every page, one idea or fact connects to another, which connects to another, and so forth, making a giant web of things in my brain. I can learn new facts easily by connecting them to existing branches, and sometimes, I can fill in details based on the gaps. All brains do this, constantly. This is why you can “see” in parts of your vision where you’re not directly looking, such as the gap where your nose should be. Except I can feel my brain doing it with concepts, helping me learn things by building connections and filling in gaps, allowing me to absorb lessons, at least those that stick, much more easily.
But there’s more to it than that. Because plenty of people are good at building connections and learning things quickly. So what makes me good at using it? Is there a key difference in my approach that someone else might be able to replicate? 
Let’s ask the same question a different way. What’s the difference between someone who knows a lot of trivia, and someone who’s smart? Or possibly intelligent? There’s not a clear semantic line here, unless we want to try and stick to clinical measurements like IQ, which all come with their own baggage. The assumption here, which I hope you agree with, is that there’s something fundamentally different between having a great number of facts memorized, and being a smart person; the difference between, for instance, being able to solve a mathematical equation on a test, and being able to crunch numbers for a real world problem.
There’s a now famous part in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein (spoilers follow) mice attempt to build a supercomputer to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The answer? 42. Yes, that’s definitely the answer. The problem is, it’s not useful or meaningful, because it’s for the wrong question. See, “life, the universe, and everything” isn’t really a good question itself. An answer can’t make sense without the right question, so the fact that 42 is the answer doesn’t help anyone. 
So, what is the difference between being knowledgeable and being smart? Asking good questions. Being knowledgeable merely requires being to parrot back key points, but asking good questions requires understanding, insight, inquiry and communication. It also shows other people that you are paying attention to them, care enough to ask them, and are interested in learning. And most of the time, if you start asking questions that are novel and on-point, people will just assume that you have a complete background in the area, making you seem like an expert.
Unlike natural talent, this is a skill that can be honed. Asking really good questions often relies on having some background information about the topic, but not as much as one might think. You don’t have to memorize a collection of trivia to seem intelligent, just demonstrate an ability to handle and respond to new information in an intelligent way.