The hard write

Writing is the one skill most of have to work the hardest to become good at. And I’m not just talking about learning a second language. It’s the one language skill, among the four main ones of speaking, listening, reading and writing, that probably requires the most conscious effort and attention. 

Most of us learnt listening and speaking to a reasonably high level before we were even aware we were learning. All those weird sounds emanating from the large figures around you just needed to be understood, and then instructed in your needs, by you. So, you learnt. Bit by bit, slowly, year upon year, until by seven or eight you could hold a pretty darn good conversation. And then you just went on learning, picking up the language of your peers, people in movies and on TV and the adults around you, then mixing it all up together and forming your own unique idiolect. Well done you.

As for reading, well, that was a bit more tricky, granted. But anyone reading this right now was no doubt as privileged as I was to attend full-time education from the age of at least six, depending on your own country’s system, and quietly start the long process of working out the basics of letters, before progressing to phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences and complex passages of text. Again, well done you. 

But writing. Well. They did teach you at school, and again, the basics were given ample attention for you to master before finally waving goodbye to your teachers and classmates and setting off to the world of work, or higher education. But it always felt like a task, didn’t it? Sitting down to put pen to paper, or characters upon a computer screen, always required so much more concentration than just opening your cake hole to make a coherent noise for others to make sense of. And this is, as I said, your first language, or mother tongue as we people like to maternally refer to it. 

So why so hard? As I suggested earlier, and I hope you are not offended here, you didn’t really do much to learn to speak your own language, now did you? It just kind of happened to you, as you went along playing with your Lego, watching TV, running around with your friends and tuning in to, or out of, adult conversations, listening and speaking just, sort of occurred.  But writing, and its sibling of reading let’s not forget, required you, yes YOU, to actually DO something. To actually sit down and work on your skill. A serious skill, you thought, not a fun skill like kicking, throwing or hitting a ball, for example. And serious skills feel sooo much like work and something that spoils fun that writing became a task, something you only did when you really had to. And then, thankfully, education ended and you never had reason to write much again. Phew!

So you abandoned improving your writing. Shame. But you’re not alone. I know many intelligent native speakers whose writing I have been obliged to read, either formally or informally, and been genuinely surprised just how bad it is. I am not just talking about a lack of creative spark, although that too, but poor in the way that sentence and paragraph constructions are sloppy, punctuation is misplaced, metaphors are mixed up, and meaning is vague, or outright lost in the confusion. Strangely, I am more forgiving of spelling mistakes, although these can be avoided these days with a reasonable spell checker.

I guess these people never got over the block from school – that writing is an arduous task that you just have to grin and bear. Again, shame. Me? I love writing. I don’t profess myself to be a great writer. I’m a hack, if I’m honest. I was trained to write fast, accurate and to order ‘copy’ by my tutors and editors. I got paid and praised, which was the point, but the mastery of writing this way, without stressing over perfection, got me beyond the feeling of writing as an arduous task,  and I learnt to actually enjoy jabbering on with my fingers on a keyboard, instead of with my big noise-making gob. Now, I even write in my free-time, for the audience of me, for my pleasure, regardless of cash going into my bank account or even a pat on the back. Just putting one grammatical sentence next to another and shaping some kind of narrative brings me, can I say it? joy. Yes, writing provides me with joy. 

I can’t make you enjoy writing, but I would say, the way to make writing less painful is to simply write. Yes, the cure is in the ailment itself. Write often and anywhere and on anything. Start by writing what you want to say. Start with a diary – get some of the days events or angst off your chest. Write cool emails to friends, full of wit and insight to make them laugh. Write posts on Facebook or wherever you hang out on the internet. Start a blog about your pastime. Or don’t. Just find your place to write. Write bad poetry in a little notebook, and let it become better as your understanding of writing improves. Altogether, make writing your thing that works for you – not a task imposed from outside. 

How does this help the second language learner?   If it’s tough for your first language, how hard must it be in your second, third or fourth language? It’s rhetorical. The answer is ‘tough. Very tough.’ But much of that is because you didn’t get comfortable writing in your first language. So, I will say here what I say to my non-native English writing students in the classroom, start writing more in your first language. I regularly make my students read more books in their native language too, while encouraging them to write and improve in their mother tongues. Why? To remove that fear, that heavy feeling whenever they are asked to write in English by first removing it from the language they think they no longer need to improve upon. That is, their mother tongue.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to read which students in my classes write the best in English. Those students who like writing, and reading, in their native language nearly always appear to be more comfortable writing in English, and their work naturally seems less burdened, lighter and more engaging. And these students aren’t always the best English students – at least not according to test scores and perceived speaking skills. They just understand how to write. 

So, if you want to write better in English, and I do believe you’ll be better all round from it, then do as you did, or do, with your first language: practice. To write with ease requires you to use your writing skill all the time, as you did when you were a jabbering baby learning to speak. Write, mess up, get feedback, write some more, mess up differently, get better, and better and, if you practice long enough, you will become a strong writer. And, who knows, you may even get some joy from it. Yes, the joy of writing is a thing. Happy writing!