The text for-itself/why writing is nice.
By: Bernardo Menescal
Tags: Personal, Language Learning, Practice, Writing, Learning

I am now become fully (I would venture to say, painfully) aware of how fortunate I was to have studied where I did. But a little bit more on that later; I’ll set the scene first.

Earlier today, after three grueling weeks of racking my brain after remnants of my knowledge of English grammar and juggling reams of data from indicators to plans to news to legislation, I managed to hand in a still somewhat problematic version of a consulting report I pledged to deliver. I was foolish enough (thankfully) to take on a challenge that I felt, during the process, was far beyond my abilities.

For starters, over the last two years or so I haven’t been using my English for much other than watching Netflix series, reading articles on The Economist and, on rare occasions, talking to random people at a weekly meetup (note that while the meetup was weekly, but my presence was not). And with writing, as with any other skill, practice makes perfect and no practice sets you up for disappointment.

Indeed, as soon as I sat down to write the report and typed my first sentence, I felt stumped. I could barely tell the difference between an unidiomatic phrase and a good one, something that years ago I would’ve known instinctively. Likewise, my vocabulary was a mishmash of expressions that were neither Portuguese (my mother tongue btw) nor English, but some unintelligible garble in between. I was upset, and the feeling only got worse when I realized my English was now too rusty for me to even voice that limitation.

As if the prospect of not completing the report (or doing so with the dullest English in my entire life, which is a proper bummer for someone who cares about style in writing) wasn’t disheartening enough, I also felt overtaken by the uneasy feeling that I had lost touch with a huge part of my personality. That part of me that only exists in English, had fallen into a — erm, I wouldn’t say bottomless, but let’s go with a “terrifyingly deep and somber” pit of linguistic ignorance, and I stood here at the edge of the precipice, vexed and powerless, with but a thin thread of grammatical rope in my hands.

Maybe you can see where I am going now or maybe you can’t, but, rest assured, we’re on the same boat. This was more or less stream of consciousness all the way through and I am only now starting to make sense of the whole thing.

So, let’s get systematic in this ***** (choose your profanity), and start wrapping it up. Here are the main takeaways.

(1) Letting your proficiency in a language fade away, when that language means a lot to you in professional and personal terms, will probably make you sad and the pain of having to deal with this is far worse than the, really, negligible suffering of having to practice. Granted, life sometimes gets awfully hectic (as it did for me) and such things are easier said than done. Nevertheless, by reminding myself of the pain of loss and the joy of connection I can find the will to do right by my languages.

(2) It’s good to be asked to write a lot when you’re in school and nothing you do has serious implications, above all not to other people’s lives. Although writing in a professional context comes with an extra touch of excitement (and, now and then, your writing might cause stuff to happen in the “outside world”) it also comes with responsibility and responsibility + inability = stress. True, stress is a fact of life, but it’s the kind of fact we like to avoid, if possible, for own sake and for others’; especially if we’re talking about that noxious, irate cum depressive stress that strikes when our mindset makes us perceive our challenge as insurmountable under current conditions.

(3) In fact, there you go: writing in school is not only good for you because you’ll probably get better at it than if you didn’t do it at all, but also because it gives you a reason to believe that you are someone who can write, a homo scribens. This confidence is priceless, for it gives you a boost in acquiring new linguist and creative skills. I’m sure there is plenty of research on the topic out there that the people who really care about this are using to craft policy and make clever decisions.

That’s why, if you can still recall the lonely opening paragraph, I was damned lucky to have studied where I did: I had to write a lot, i.e. I had to put myself out there, make myself into who I am. Every new assignment was an opportunity to find out/carve out who I was. That is the sort of thing (the connection between doing and becoming) you hear in life or read in a book somewhere, but it only makes sense once you live it and reflect upon it (because the living you’ll do anyways, even if in a desultory way).

Hopefully you, too, have had the chance to write in school. Hopefully, you still write and still witness the beauty of seeing yourself blossom (the French word épanouissement springs to mind), fold into a million shapes, squalid and/or sublime, subdued and/or passionate. If you didn’t, or if right now you hesitate, just write to yourself. Revel in who you are, regardless of whether you appear in one sentence or many.

This text was born from fear, nurtured by google searches for synonyms, spelling checks and an urge to exist. It is the first of its kind to venture into the open world, despite being told by Grammarly that it is “a bit bland, slightly off and with 30 advanced issues”.