Daily Dose of English 153
Conventions
Daily Dose of English 153
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about conventions. And I actually want to talk about two very, very different things that both have the definition or name of conventions. Because there are two things that stick out in my mind. So the first one that is more common nowadays when people think of conventions is a large gathering of people who are looking to do and talk about or meet about something similar. So they are meeting about the same thing, if that makes sense. So a big video game convention or, well, I mean, I think one of the most famous ones is Comic Con. So comic convention, Comic Con. And that's a very, very big convention. And that happens actually many different times in the year. But there's tons and tons of conventions. They can be anything from stuff like comics and kind of nerdy things all the way to more conventions about biology and advances in science and stuff like that. So there's a very wide range of what is a convention. Which is part of the thing that makes them cool because they're not just one thing. There's thousands of possible convention ideas and I'm sure there's many, several thousand different conventions that happen all over the world based on different things and interests and that kind of thing. And some people absolutely love them. They're huge fans. They go to as many conventions as they can. And some people hate them. They're very not interested in conventions because they are, either they're very loud, very busy, there's lots of stuff going on, things like that, which can be very overwhelming. I've only been to a few conventions and most of them were for a card game that I used to play a lot called Magic the Gathering. I'm trying to think if I've gone to other conventions. I feel like I must have gone to like one other convention, but I can't really remember and I'm pretty sure it's just those. Maybe something like related, like I'm sure I've been to a I think I actually went to a version of Comic-Con with a friend, but I didn't really want to go. I just had free tickets, so I was like, sure, I'll go hang out with you for a bit. But I never really went to anything else on purpose. That's actually not totally true. I was at a magic convention here in Mexico City once. And across the hall, there was a weed convention, like a marijuana convention. And there was an announcement and they said, attention magic players or something like that. The weed convention is decided to give all of you free access if you want to go over there. And so I like, of course, with some friends, I went over there because like, that's why not? It's a free convention, you could go see all the people partying. It was very interesting. It was a little darker. And there was a lot of people that were sort of It was sort of like a club almost, like a dance club with places to buy stuff. It was interesting. It was a cool vibe for sure because it also wasn't like super loud like a dance club. It was loud for sure, but like it wasn't to the point where it's like, oh my God, this is way too much noise. And so that was kind of cool. But most of the conventions I've gone to have been to play a specific game. which is pretty cool. I have nothing against conventions. I'm not a very huge crowd person. I don't love to go out into crowds and I just have tons and tons of people around. I'm much more of a stay-at-home kind of person. I like to host people and have people over, but I just don't like to go to huge gatherings of people just because there's so many people. I also don't like the sickness that sometimes comes out of it. I've only gotten it like once, but after a convention when you've been in a room with literally thousands of people for a day or two, it's very common that people get sick. It's usually just like a cold or a flu or something normal like that, so it's nothing really dangerous. But it's not fun. You don't want to be sick, right? So that's another reason why a lot of people do avoid them is because they have For them, it would be a big deal to get any kind of sickness. So that's another thing against going to cons is the potential for sickness. The other thing that I don't like is that they almost never have good food options. I went to a pretty large one in Las Vegas once. and the food inside was terrible and super expensive and the food outside was okay and super expensive. And so I would like walk to somewhere actually okay to get food because like, I don't know, if you're gonna go hang out and play a game for 10 hours a day, might as well have some okay food, right? But I don't know, maybe that's just me. Now, I wanna talk a little bit about the other name of conventions, which I'm not even sure if it's used anymore. But growing up, I always learned about spelling and conventions. So spelling is how you spell words, right? So knowing that English is E-N-G-L-I-S-H, right? That sort of thing. But conventions are the punctuation essentially. So the way that you write. everything and like the way that you structure sentences and phrases and that sort of thing. So you can kind of think of it as being the same word as punctuation, except for being a bit more broad, because punctuation only refers to like a period, a space, a colon, parentheses, that sort of thing. But conventions also are like how you space a page, the margins, the font size, and that sort of thing. And so growing up, we started to type our assignments fairly late, actually. I didn't grow up without computers, pretty much always had computers in my life, so I'm not that old, but they weren't really introduced as a normal part of school until I was probably in sixth grade or seventh grade, something like that. I'm not sure if that was all over the country or if my school was a little bit slower on that. But honestly, for younger kids, they don't really need to know how to type stuff because writing is fine. I don't think that kids need computers or phones or anything like that until a certain point because they're kids. I don't know. Yeah, anyways, so conventions are like how you write things out and spaces and that sort of thing. And this is actually also kind of interesting to me because a lot of people learn different conventions and different ways to write and different writing styles that are all arguably correct. It just depends on sort of what the standard is or what you're trying to do and how you write. I always try to write with at least some decent conventions and spaces and spelling and all these things. Spelling not so much but everything else because I find that it's very useful for readability. And that's I think the big thing behind conventions is that it makes it easier to read something. It's like pausing when you're speaking and using your tone of voice to make what you're saying clearer to the other person. Because if I was just to speak in one, I can't do it. Because if I was to speak with only one note and without changing anything in my voice and it was always just one sentence that never stopped and it just kept going on and on and on, then it would be really hard to understand. Because that's not really how the language works, right? We don't just speak like that. And so we also shouldn't write like that, right? If you just write one continuous sentence, it's hard to understand. I see this all the time online, especially in YouTube comments or Discord posts, where people either ask a question or they want to say something and it's really hard to figure out what they're trying to say because it's... like a whole paragraph that's in one sentence no capitalization no punctuation and you have to like find in your mind where it is if they said it aloud it would probably be pretty easy to understand but that's because they're using tone of voice and pauses and things like that to make their idea clearer and so that's how I see conventions. Adding spaces and line breaks and using punctuation and parentheses to me makes something way easier to actually follow. Don't totally ignore it. It's also not critical, right? You're not going to be terrible at English if you never learn conventions. But I find that they are very, very helpful for getting your point across, especially if you're not super confident with either spelling or the language yet. Clear, structured sentences can help a native speaker guess. Right, because if I just see your one sentence with a bunch of errors and problems in it, I might have no idea what you're trying to say. But if you say a short sentence that has like an error or two, and then another one, and then another one, it's actually pretty easy to figure out because you go, oh, I see what you're trying to say, of course. But that's not how a lot of people try to write, so I would definitely recommend you do it. Not necessarily because it's better, it's just easier for the other person trying to read. And that to me is a very useful thing when trying to communicate. But that's all that I have for today. I hope that you enjoyed this sort of split episode of two very distinct topics. And I hope that I see you again tomorrow for another episode. I'll see you then. Bye-bye.
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