Learning how to write again

Writing as a skill is soooo underrated and all too often I don't practice it enough. I want to learn to write better... and the only way to do that is to do it more.

Over the past year or so, I’ve become increasingly aware that my writing skills suck. I know what I want to say in my head, but when I try to express it, everything becomes a jumbled mess. More than a few times people had to ask me to clarify what I meant. Sometimes I review past notes I’ve written and even confuse myself.

I don’t know when it happened, but writing feels like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube now. It used to be so effortless. Now every sentence takes me excruciatingly long to write, and I have to sit and think about what’s the best way to articulate what I’m thinking. I get tripped up on word choices, grammar, and sentence structure.

It’s frustrating because sometimes you want to jot something down quickly, but end up not being able to translate it to paper quick enough. I’m currently taking this modern Chinese history class—I love it so much, but the professor talks like she’s an auctioneer. And I’m just sitting there, barely figuring out how to write down things she said minutes ago.

Rusty, for reasons

Like any skill, consistent practice will allow you to get better. Problem is, I don’t think I’ve seriously written anything since freshman year of college, when Penn forces you to take a writing seminar class. I kind of regret not paying more attention to it.

Most importantly, though, I think I’ve only ever written because someone else required me to.

Whether that be essays, or Canvas discussion posts, or book analyses, there was always someone else defining the objective for me. My classes throughout middle school, high school, and college did the hard part for me: figure out why you’re writing. I just clacked away.

Quarantine

There are some other reasons I can point to. (I’ve given this a lot of thought.) The pandemic and the subsequent quarantine was destructive for me in more ways than one. A lot of things shut down for me in those ~1.5 years. Not to get Too Personal On Main, but I genuinely think it’s affected my ability to

  1. talk about my feelings and thoughts
  2. express myself in a coherent and non-insane manner

Text message syndrome

I’m calling it this because the way I text people is completely different from full, real, dedicated writing. Text messages are often temporary, and this affects the way I view them and write them. At least for me, I’m an all lowercase, no punctuation, run on sentences kinda texter.

That can’t be healthy for my long term writing skills, man.

I feel like I have to relearn how to express things across multiple sentences that aren’t just limited to a length of 1-5 words. I can’t be the only one that feels like this.

Who cares

Okay, well, why are you telling us this, you, the imaginary reader, might be asking. What a wonderful question, reader. Can I give you a name? Alright, your name is now Hector.

It turns out that writing is kinda fun actually, Hector. Expressing yourself feels good. Connecting with others through your writing feels good. And sometimes, I have cool stuff I wanna talk about, like my projects and what I’ve been working on recently.

Too bad I’m ▊▊▊▊ing terrible at talking about them.

Often I get so frustrated with my writing that I would rather just not talk about stuff that’s on my mind. But that makes me sad too. I love yapping. So in my eyes, there’s only one way forward: I gotta relearn how to write.

Writing more :)

I’m not writing enough. So I’m doing a few things to fix that.

Obviously, I will try to write more posts like these. Even now, this has taken me longer to write than I would like to admit. I would also like to go through my previous posts and flesh them out a bit more, writing more about implementation details and my thought process.

otherworld is my attempt to expose part of my Obsidian vault to the public. Currently it’s mostly notes that I’ve synthesized from class lectures and textbooks. It’s been instrumental to my studying, and I’ll probably write a bit more about it in a future post.

Changelogs is a project that I’ve been chipping away at on and off. It’s very, very, very writing intensive, and partly sparked the realization that my writing skills are dogwater. Hopefully I’ll finish it Soon™ and also get to write about it.

Finally, I have to be okay with my writing sucking for a while. It will serve as a measure of how my writing has improved over time. Thanks for reading.