Daily Dose of English 201
Writing
Daily Dose of English 201
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 writing. Writing is a fundamental thing that we do as people every day in the modern world. We write text messages, we write stories, we write about our day, we write for work. There's so much writing that goes on in the world, and yet I feel like a lot of people don't appreciate it for how important it is in many, many ways. It's sort of taken for granted, which makes sense, right? It is also just a tool, but I think it's a very, very underutilized tool. And I'm not even complaining about like, the kids don't read books these days, which is actually true. Interestingly, books have basically been replaced with other forms of media in the mainstream youth, which is Interesting. I probably would hazard a guess that it's not a great thing, but I'm also not like... I don't think that you have to read books or anything like that. I like them, but I'm talking about writing as a useful tool for thought as well. Because this is something that I've learned in the past Probably like a year or so maybe more. I don't know how time is just so not real. I Don't know how long it's been since I've been thinking about this and doing this but thinking about reading or writing as a tool for thinking and improving your ideas by putting them down on paper and understanding better maybe your arguments or the flow of a thought and that sort of thing. Speaking of thoughts, I just lost my train of thought. And so writing I see as a very important tool for that kind of thing. I do it for work, I do it for projects, I do it for a lot of the stuff that I do for this podcast. Not usually during, sorry, not this podcast, this YouTube channel. I usually do it before I actually record anything, but it's like a process of actually setting up that process, whatever. And I find there's a pretty good book called Writing to Learn that I think has a really good way of talking about this. The first half of the book is all you need, like the first third, I think. Then it's a bunch of examples. I didn't even finish it because it's like she just goes into more and more examples that just get more and more boring. But reading the first third of the book plus a couple of examples I think is a great exercise because it talks about how to use writing to basically improve your thinking and to make things clearer and to make teaching better. And you can write about anything. There are writers that are good at writing about literally everything. You can find good writing about sports, about sciences, about anything. I could list literally everything, but that's the point. And I feel like that I certainly wasn't using that idea before because I was sort of just hoping that my thoughts would formalize or become more better or inside my brain, but that just isn't true. And sitting down to write out your thoughts and to organize something is so important for creating a coherent and well thought out idea. I don't really know how else to explain it. Writing is also great for getting your, for forcing yourself to think logically, if that makes, not logically, but like finish yourself, ugh, speaking of which, forcing yourself to make complete sentences and complete thoughts, which is not the exact same thing as what I was talking about before with like making better thoughts and better, and better, more constructed ideas. But if you just sit down and you write 500 words right now, you could do it without any spaces or without any thinking about punctuation and creating coherent sentences. But that's harder than actually having things flow together. Okay, it's not harder, but I hope you can kind of see what I mean. But when you write down, you have to formalize your language. Language that we use every day is messy and weird. And as you've noticed, I go off on tangents, I cut myself off. It's messy and it's not helpful for thinking. But when you sit down and you think about what you're trying to say and you put it into basic sentences, even if you're not like necessarily restructuring an argument, it changes a little bit about the way that you think about something. And I frequently have done that and have found it really helpful for also forcing me to think about something and like put into words something that I might be feeling or thinking about or doing or whatever. Personally, I've been trying to write more not for work, because I write plenty of things for work. I write YouTube videos. I write thousands of words. I build projects and things like that. I write a lot during work, but I've been trying to write more outside of work. not for any real reason but other than to write. I want to be a better writer and I want to make writing a bigger part of my life and so I've started doing a write streak. I only have a few days on my streak because it is sort of hard, where I write at least 500 words a day. I want to bring it up to 1,000 words. That's my actual goal. But 1,000 words is actually kind of hard. It takes me like 20, 30 minutes to do, which is a pretty big time chunk right now for me. 500 words I can do in about 10 minutes. It's not too bad. And I haven't timed it yet, but I think that's about the amount of time. And 500 words is still a good chunk to get something out there. But again, I want to get up to 1,000 words. Because if you can do 1,000 words for 1,000 days, which isn't even three years, then that is 1 million words written, which is a lot of words. A full novel is 90,000 words. And so if you were to write 1,000 words a day for 90 days, which is three months, that is the length of a novel. Not necessarily the quality of a novel, but is the length of a novel. And that's the sort of thing that I want to be able to do and then do it over a long period of time to eventually start to write things that actually are important. Because something that I've also been learning, sorry, let me clarify that. I want to write things that I think are good and are worth other people reading. Because right now, all I do is write for me. I don't really write for any reason other than just to write or to get an idea out there. But I absolutely want to get to a point where I can write things that I feel like are worth either publishing or putting out there or giving to other readers in a way that I'm happy with and proud of what I've written. I'm not very good yet, I'm not there, but I wanna get there is my point. So I have to practice this skill of writing. And as I've learned also again in the past couple of years, there is so much that is a deep skill and the beginning of learning that skill is just doing it, even if you're kind of bad, right? So if it's, anything like music or meditation or writing or cooking. A lot of these things just take reps, repetitions. You have to just start to do the thing a lot to start to build the connections in your brain and then you can actually get into really actually learning how to do it better. But it is so overwhelming to try to, if you've never written anything formally before, right? Let's say that you only write text messages and you do a little bit of writing for work, right? A couple hundred words, you write some emails or whatever. And then you just go, I want to write a book. I've always wanted to write a book. I want to write a book. And so you sit down and you take some courses and you go, okay, I'm going to write my book. First, my first words are about my book. That's impossible. You cannot just write a book without first having written a lot of stuff, words, and things. And that is the important thing that I want, that I have realized about, sort of also myself, is that for me, a lot of things, like the beginning of them are fairly easy. I can pick up stuff pretty quickly. And that especially when I was younger would, I'm still quite young, but like younger, younger is the key word there. I would take that for granted and then be like, okay, there's no way I can necessarily get better. It's not really worth trying. Talked about this before, that's what happened with me and music. And I don't want to have that happening because I feel like I would just end up being very mediocre at a bunch of different things, which I don't want to do. I would like to be actually good at things. And so I'm starting with just writing things. Then I'll probably convert it into trying to write a blog of some kind or turn or write into a way that like other people can read. And then I would like to see what I can do from there. Maybe it's writing stories or nonfiction. I have no idea. I'm just trying to write for now. So, that's the end of this episode. If you enjoyed, which I hope you did, definitely leave a comment below and I want to hear about your writing. Do you write very often? What language do you like to write in? And what kinds of things do you like to write do you want to get into writing in the future? Those are all questions to keep in mind. Write me a comment below and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.