On writing

Woah, I just spent a lot of time reading manga and doing absolutely nothing useful....

Anyway, during the first week of this semester, two of my lecturers (different classes, same day) mentioned that writing is very important to civil engineers. One of them said that his wife was an English major and that he has written way more stuff than she has. Slightly shocking... But it makes sense, I guess. As an engineer, you have to communicate with a ton of people. And different people too. Other engineers, architects, contractors, construction workers, finance people, "the public," etc.

This is all to say that I wish I can write better. Humanities classes definitely help. At the beginning of last semester, I felt really rusty when I had to write history papers. In fact, I don't think I did so well in my first linguistics paper. My writing got better as the semester went on. I was out of practice. This is kind of scary since it happens every semester. I feel really rusty in the beginning. Usually it's really bad in September because I hadn't done any writing over the summer. But I've been keeping this blog for a while now and updating it regularly. It's not the same type of writing but you'd think you should help. So maybe I need to ramp up the contents of this blog. Write about more meaningful stuff? (what if there's none to write about...? heh.)

I used to think that I'm self conscious about writing emails and speaking to technical people because I don't know what I'm talking about most of the time. I'm not sure that's true. I mean, it would help to know more technical things but communication skills is not something that can be improved just because you know more about something else.

Actually, I think this anthropology class that I'm taking this semester will help. Instead of writing responses to readings all the time, we also get to write about fieldwork. I really like writing about fieldwork. We did some of that in linguistics class. It was great because you have data to write about. But the stuff I wrote about last semester was a bit dry since it was like "the adverb goes before the ...." Anthropology is different though because you're asking people about their lives, their work, etc. and then you weave a story out of their stories. It's pretty interesting work. Pushes me out of my comfort zone.

That's another thing. I find that things that pushes me out of my comfort zone give me the greatest satisfaction. Sounds reasonable, right? But does that mean that's why I do it? Sometimes I think about these things for a long time before I do them. I wish I could hesitate less. Does it get better with practice? Sorry if this is vague but I'm mainly rambling to myself. What I'm trying to say is that I think sometimes I do things just because it's pushes myself out of the bubble. I do it because it's satisfying afterwards and I can say that I've done it. This brings be to an entry that I've been working on.