How I learned to write and speak well.
You can change yourself if you truly want to.
The following post by Craig Perry on how to become dangerously articulate reminded me of a similar transformation I went through a very long time ago.
When I was in high-school, specially during my O’Levels years, my English sucked. My written English wasn’t great, even though I had studied in English medium schools all my life. My spoken English was worse. I was terrified of speaking in English in front of anyone. Looking back, I can attribute it in part to not having friends/peers who prioritized communicating in English (as teens do now) resulting in zero peer pressure to improve myself. In addition to that, despite having doctors as parents, English was hardly if ever spoken at home and therefore no specific emphasis was put on making an effort to improve it outside of school. That led to my getting a C grade in English in O’Levels, which was disappointing. And a source of great shame to me.
I distinctly remember an event where I called a phone number for a then famous A’Levels college in the city to enquire the process of admission. Little did I know that an old, stuck-up principal of the college would pick it up. As I began talking in my native tongue (not English) as is common, the old man started berating me harshly on the call in English for not being able to use English to talk to him. I was so scared I put the phone down. In hindsight, I don’t feel ashamed of using my native tongue to talk on the phone, and feel sad for the man for lashing on an innocent, potential student for not using English to communicate over an inquiry call. But at that time, it left a scalding mark on me, one I didn’t tell anyone about for years to come.
However, all these experiences—getting the bad grade in English exams and not being able to speak fluently and clearly in English and that traumatizing phone experience—led me to decide to fix my circumstances myself. Thus began an adventure into self-improvement that took me to crowded ends of the city into an old book thrift market from where I bought books on grammar and vocabulary and consumed them like my life depended on them. I began reading a lot, and using a pocket dictionary to understand words I didn’t know. Not only that, I began recording those words down in a thick journal, along with a few sentences explaining their use. By the time I stopped doing it, I had two journals filled with word definitions. Not only did I use to routinely review my journal, from start to end, so that I could retain the words I had learnt, I began to use those words every chance I got at writing anything down. This infamously led to essays and letters I wrote during my college and University years that were extremely difficult both for my peers and my teachers to understand because of the vocabulary I chose to use and felt proud of. The time I spent learning, or re-learning, grammar helped improved my sentence structures, and before I knew it, was writing freely for myself without considering whether the person reading it would understand most of it without a dictionary in tow. Of course, it took me a while to realize that the best piece of writing is not one with a lot of hard vocabulary in it, but one that can be easily understood by many.
All of that, of course, didn’t help with my poor speaking skills. Back then, I did not have anyone I could practice with—although that could likely also have been because I was very shy. Instead, I singlehandedly came up with a technique that helped me immensely: talking out loud to myself when alone in English. If I was out for a walk, which I did frequently on the roof of my house at nights, I would express my thoughts in English to myself out loud. Even when I couldn’t say it out loud, I forced myself to think in English. It got to the point where English came naturally to me, even inside my head. This trick alone did more for improving my speaking skills than anything else. I went from being scared of standing in front of a class to speak to intentionally not preparing before speaking in University only so I could force myself to go down and speak extempore every time. That, for me, was a massive personal transformation. I lost all of my written pieces when my ThinkPad laptop crashed and the site (before wordpress and blogpost) where I published them was lost to oblivion, but what I was writing back them did not read like something written by a non-native English speaker who got a C in English in school. It wasn’t privilege that got me there. Nobody helped me. Nobody told me I had to change. I got a gut punch so bad and so painful, I had no choice but to push myself to undertake this painful transition.
When I am teaching students during my various academies, this is the one lesson I always try to instill in them, specially since there are students in my classes that come from different backgrounds and often doubt themselves. You don’t have to be born into privilege, or have advantages other people have because of their families or what they are born into. All you need is determination to decide you want to make that transformation, and the discipline to see through it. Everything else is secondary.
And as it goes, knowing how to articulate yourself well, how to speak and write well, it takes you a long way, ahead of others who cannot. I have experienced this first hand.