Writing Is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
blog.stephsmith.io
blog.stephsmith.io
Then someone in HN commented in one of my posts "I don't trust any writing advice from someone who thinks "certificated" is a word" lol
That killed most of my confidence of writing in English and I gave up the idea of having a newsletter.
Whoever thinks you can’t teach them because of a small typo probably wasn’t going to learn anything anyway.
I'm living and working in London and English is not my native language. I'm doing lots of grammar and orthography mistakes every day. They really don't matter as long as I'm able to get my point across. That's all it matters. Even if someone was in the position to tell me that they don't trust me, I would leave BUT I would go somewhere else, I wouldn't go back to my home country.
Well maybe the above doesn't completely fit your case, I just wanted to share my 2 cents.
OS: I have been writing in my tech blog in English the past 5 years. Often times I'm catching my self reading my older posts and just can't stand them. They are awful. :D
You could speed it up by having an editor review your work and that way you can also have confidence your reputation isn't going to be undermined.
Having an editor would definitely help! Good idea to think about. Just not sure if a free blog is worth investing that money.
It's pretty common amongst webnovels, translations, and fanfiction for an editor to help out and get attributed.
If I'm reading a piece by an author whose 1st language is not English, I'll make adjustments in what I think mistakes say about them. Most readers will. And I'll be focusing on content and ideas and glossing over sentence details.
It can be even be a positive, "This is impressive writing for a non-native speaker..."
If, on the other hand, you are trying to pass yourself off as someone with the same command as a native speaker, I'll be turned off.
http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=cer...
This doesn't sound native either.
You could have said certified. For what it is worth.
Congratz, it's a word.
I think the usage may stem from the legal requirement for teachers to hold an actual certificate prior to being employed. I think it is different from "certified" in that no organization is attesting to anticipated performance, instead merely indicating that some past effort happened.
For example, a law school graduate is certificated, but not certified or licensed. They could go around claiming they are "certificated in law" without breaking the law.
One who has obtained a certificate is "certified", not "certificated" in layperson English. It's stilted English to say "certificated", even if technically correct.
Obviously it's not reasonable to trust/mistrust someone who makes this mistake, but the nugget to pull from this is that "certified" has a meaning and use in English.
Native speakers don't have exclusive rights to give advice on how to communicate. I really hope you'll keep writing.
I feel bad for you because you couldn't handle the inanity of the Internet. You're going to need thicker skin if you want to find success, because people will always cut you down, doubly so if you're on the right track.
It sounds mean, and maybe it could be phrased nicer (minus the "I feel bad for you" part), but it's not wrong. All socially interactive sites online will eventually attract people who attack someone doing a service, as in the case of the OP, and they will do everything they can to insult you, make you feel bad, or generally fling all manner of dirt in your direction. Worse, if you stop doing what you're doing you're essentially giving them exactly what they want: Stop posting.
The best solution is to continue. Double down if need be. Learn something from it and move on. In fact, if the OP really wants to get back at them, continuing to write is probably the best way forward. Hell, find someone who would be willing to edit your work. Also, recognize that mistakes will be made. Multi-million dollar publications with dozens of editors on staff sometimes have glaring mistakes slip through the process. There isn't much more you can do as a solo writer without hitting diminishing returns in the pursuit of perfection. Judging by the comments, it looks like the "mistake" wasn't, which makes this situation even more absurd, and the willingness to give in even more so!
Ultimately, just recognize some people are toxic. And like diminoten said: They will always cut you down. If someone isn't willing to offer constructive criticism, or take the time to write it, nothing they've written is worth reading. Treat it that way.
Amusingly, I had something similar happen to me on social media recently over my use of the colloquialism "performant" that's often used here on HN (and plenty of places elsewhere--just search Wikipedia for some examples). Except in this case, it's not a word. Rather than do what they want (I'm not sure what that would be), I doubled down. They weren't adding anything to a technical discussion (and admitted they knew nothing about the subject matter), so I politely told them that if they wanted to interject with anything, to keep it on topic. They didn't. I persisted. They blocked me. Sometimes the problems solve themselves, but it's important not to let them dissuade you from enjoying what you're doing.
You HAVE to be a bit more aggressive. It's not easy (I know, trust me), but in this case, the OP is doing something that sounds like it's beneficial to a lot of people. Don't stop doing it because of one jerk. If you do, we're all worse off.
I think you (and the GP) got it wrong that what made me stop was having someone being rude to me on the internet. The lack of confidence is because I know that there were and there would be for a long time a lot of mistakes in my writing. And my blog is about writing of all things, which makes those mistakes worse. What affected my confidence was not that the commenter was rude, was that he/she was right
The comment about the word "certificated" was correct in its spirit. Even if there are arguments to say that it might a word and could be technically correct in some form, I did want to write "certified". I even edited my post.
I have noticed published mistakes myself and had private and much nicer feedback about other mistakes before. That was the confirmation that I actually do a larger number of mistakes than a native speaker.
The free blog is one of the things that I do and lacking the confidence that I could do it well enough, I decided to stop doing it and go for other things. I had several nice comments here that can make me reconsider my decision, including yours. As for GP, it was not helpful or correct, it was just arrogant and presumptuous.
The reason I say this is because, quite frankly, if you hadn't taken what was said personally, internalizing it as thus, you would still be writing and none of this conversation would have taken place. You disagree, and I understand; however, recognize that as an outsider looking in, I think you're too dismissive of the impact this interaction had on your work (you stopped writing). It doesn't matter whether the person was right or wrong: The fact they said they didn't trust you because of a single mistake was demeaning.
For what it's worth, I still stand by what I said earlier: If someone isn't willing to write constructive criticism, preferring to resort to negative language or insults, then nothing they say matters. If they're right, they're right, but the best you can do is just ignore the negative sentiments and move on. It's not easy. You'll second guess yourself (as you're doing). And you know what? That's fine! You'll be more cautious next time, and you'll have the added confidence that you can deal with similar responses in the future (I'm serious).
To put it another way: It's not so much that the individual in question was correct that dinged your confidence--it's how they said it. I'm almost certain had it been written differently you'd have thought nothing more of it; e.g. "Hey, I think you meant to write 'certified' rather than 'certificated.' Just thought I'd let you know."
Think for a moment on that. If this were written instead, would you still feel your confidence had taken a hit? I'd wager not!
Chin up, my friend. If an asshole is right about something, it doesn't make them less of an asshole--they're just an asshole who happens to be right.
> "If this were written instead, would you still feel your confidence had taken a hit? I'd wager not!"
I certainly would. Actually, I did. My confidence had already taken hits before from nicer private feedback I got before.
I also disagree that I should dismiss everything that an asshole is saying just because they're an asshole, even if they are right. I take what is right, improve my text and forget about them being an asshole.
Therefore, focus on checking that your regular readers are enjoying what you write, instead of focusing too much on actual or perceived weaknesses.
I think perspective here is important. While anything that a speaker and hearer agree has meaning can be considered a word, there is definitely a separate matter of blending in to a particular linguistic context. I wouldn't deny that.
But I do think it's important to remember that what you're doing is trying to blend in to a particular linguistic context... not trying to be right instead of wrong. In some English contexts, "kindly do the needful" is a normal, unremarkable phrase. In others, it barely registers as English at all. In some, you can rent a flat when you go on holiday. In others, it's an apartment and a vacation.
Regardless of context (to my knowledge), we talk about a "building site" not a "building place", for no apparent reason.
There are no reasonable criteria by which any of those phrasings can be considered "wrong". They just don't sound natural in some (or all) contexts. But when you consider this perspective, things get muddy quickly because language usage varies so much. Like... I would say your sentence "I have noticed published mistakes myself and had private and much nicer feedback about other mistakes before." would sound more natural with "have" added... "I have noticed published mistakes myself and have had private and much nicer feedback about other mistakes before." But I can't say a native speaker would never say it the way you did, so what do we take from that? Probably any piece of writing can be improved, whether by a native or non-native speaker. At what level do we say the speaker sounds native? It's just all very muddy.
It's not even clear who gets to count as a native speaker. Is someone who grew up speaking Indian English in school but a different language at a home a native English speaker? Their accent and word choices will make very clear they aren't a native speaker from an "English speaking country" (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), but... English is an official language of India and spoken every day by millions of people there. Is someone who grew up in Amsterdam and learned English in school from childhood and has used it extensively as an international / business / default fallback language for their entire adult life a native English speaker?
Nothing with language is black and white. If your goal is to be understood and to have the fluency to express interesting ideas with nuance and clarity, then you're already there. Are there tells that you aren't as high up on the "native" spectrum as others? Yes. But if I applied the same critical eye to my own writing after 5 years when I've forgotten it was me who wrote it, I could probably find things I would perceive as non-native there too.
So basically I'm just trying to say... your skill in English does not in any way appear to be an impediment to using the language effectively. While there are things which could make you sound more native, those aren't a matter of right or wrong English... they're a matter of word choice / phrasing that sounds more familiar to the context you are speaking into.
English is my native language and I write a popular blog. My blog won a web award and a W3 writing award, so you could say that a number of industry professionals believe that I'm a decent writer. That said, I fucked up once and swapped lightning/lightening in one of my posts and I got a very similar comment to yours.
Those comments may have a tiny bit of truth - that you got something wrong - but the rest of them is bullshit; because, if we didn't trust experts who make small mistakes, we couldn't trust anyone at all.
As I wrote elsewhere: If someone isn't willing to write constructive feedback/criticism and they're reaching for the low-hanging fruit of insults and disparaging remarks, nothing they've written is worth reading. Ignore it and move on. Learn from it if you have to, but it isn't worth any further mental effort--much less going so far as to let it knock the wind out of your sails and stop posting!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/grammarly-for-chro...
[0]https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
It insists that conveys a distinct and useful meaning because they don't certify pilot quality. Instead, the pilot has been issued a certificate confirming that they passed a test to a particular minimum standard. The reason for the difference is to convey that there is no assurance or guarantee that the pilot consistently and continuously meets this standard. Unlike with a "certified used car", the FAA is not going to be held responsible if your pilot crashes your plane.
Reference: I am an FAA-certificated Flight Instructor and Commercial Pilot.
[Edit: typo, thank you lkschubert8]
Personally, it would inspire more humility about what a certificate means and my ability to consistently apply the knowledge behind it. It gives pause immediately as I consider things I could apply it to.
Language changes constantly. It is created by speakers, not by some external authority. Anyone giving the correction "that's not a word" likely has a misguided understanding of the nature of language. A word is something speakers say and hearers understand. New words are made every day and old words fall out of use every day. That's just how language works.
See also complaints about using "literally" to mean "figuratively". The sense of the word is changing to include what was previously its opposite. This is neither the first nor last time that will happen.
Advice on language usage should always be contextual. "Adorbs" is fine on Twitter, probably not a good idea in a contract. As others have pointed out, "certificated" has use in many contexts. Even if it wasn't in known use, the meaning is clear and this kind of pieced together with prefixes and suffixes jargon is quite common these days in technical or semiformal writing.
Viewing the world that way is its own punishment - if they're too lazy to evaluate advice on its qualitative merits and feel the need to latch on to petty ad-hominem criticism of spelling and grammar then they don't deserve the potentially valuable information that they've left on the table.
Conflation of personal judgement for critical evaluation is probably a theme in their life.
Somehow having a person in mind that you have to explain the whole mess to, really fucuses your thoughts and helps you in some way to figure out where you stand faster and more easily.
Writing is work. You start with words on paper (or on a laptop) and you keep on working until it isn't crap. You start with something. You end with something better.
What your college writing instructors were teaching you was your mistakes. Think about them and remember them. When they pointed out a mistake, keep on a lookout because you'll make that mistake again. People don't make random mistakes. They are very systematic in their mistakes. I still remember my corrections.
When I was in college my trick was to get a draft done a week before the deadline. It wasn't perfect. It was anything but perfect. But it was something. It said roughly, not perfectly by any stretch, what I wanted to say. Then I wrote, rewrote, edited, deleted, added, corrected, reworded, reordered, cited, formatted, spell checked, grammar checked, perfected, critiqued, tweaked, read aloud, questioned, ... on up to the deadline.
I worked. I didn't think. I worked. I didn't wait for some great thought to descend upon me from the clouds at the deadline (that works for Maureen Dowd but I'm not Maureen Dowd; she has talent and I don't). I worked. Fact is, I enjoyed my work. Pretty much a day before the deadline, I was damned cocky about my writing (lowest essay grade, A-) and then I really started having fun. At that point, I was relaxed and I really knew what I wanted. Like a cook who enjoys their own cooking, when I go back to re-read it, I thoroughly enjoy my own writing. The work and the craft show, to me at least. And if it doesn't show to me then it can't show to someone else.
Writing is work. It is closer to restaurant prep than it is to confiserie.
> Thinking is thinking and writing is writing. We regret the confusion.
You're right that the headline is oversimplified; and saying this might even obfuscate the point it's trying to make, which is that writing can be a tool to clarify thinking. This I sympathize with. Thoughts can be slippery and emotional and fallacious, but writing them down helps build compound thoughts and gives you leverage to organize them into a more coherent/rational narrative. So I think it's worth spreading the notion that writing is not just for communication, but can be a tool for thinking.
No idea if that would work but I feel like most people have no trouble talking about things they enjoy. Could be a movie, a TV show, a sport, science, twitter, instagram, no idea. If my 8th grade teacher had not asked me to write but instead just talked with me about say D&D, something I was into, I'm sure I could have spoken 1000-5000 words on it. The same words I'd have said to another kid I wanted to introduce D&D to them. I believe that would have helped me write sooner.
I also wonder if the internet is a net plus here. People write short tweets but lots of people write long comments. This comment itself is more than I think I ever wrote on a teacher chosen topic in 8th grade.
But, if I spend more time around Spanish speakers, which was my birth language, I find I do switch out the English for Spanish.
I'd expect most people with a multilingual background are similar. Your thoughts express with whatever language your brain is most comfortable with at the moment.
In this model, I imagine that many of these low-level ideas start in a non-language form, and as they bubble up to the higher levels of the mind, they get wrapped in language, as they are processed by consciousness. But since things are not simple, the higher-level agents can modulate the lower-level ones, and that's how the language parts of our minds can influence the non-language (emotional?) parts. I have experienced several instances of purely rational cognition imprinting into my emotional perception of reality.
So which language do you speak in your dreams?
How have you gone about finding them? Is there a good online directory of them in different locations?
Curious to know what writing tips or processes others are using to strengthen their "writing muscle".
It also can help to visualize the reader's response. The reader could be anyone, it could be you in the future long after you've forgotten that specific day. It could be a romantic partner. It could be a friend.
Once you have a specific reader visualized, then journaling feels more like having a conversation.
If you stop writing, the ink dries out. So write a page every day. Yes, you'll be writing about the pen and paper a bit. But your brain will be rewired to move your hand.
You'll need to learn the ritual of cleaning the pen with cool water (preferably distilled). You'll love the ritual of carefully opening the bottle of ink, and filling the converter (I recommend a blunt syringe). The bottle is very often beautiful in and of itself. Once you have refilled the pen (and cleaned it off), it begs to be used again.
Get good paper, or at least paper able to stand up to proper liquid ink.
Eventually, you will find that you're not writing about how well the ink is flowing, or whether the nib is scratchy. You'll be writing out your thoughts on the use of narrative for propaganda, or the challenges of raising children, or the sadness you feel at the change of season. Or you'll write about the pen.
You'll get in the habit, though. It will clarify your thoughts. One last recommendation: put the date on each entry. You'll find it interesting later.
Fountain pens 101 [1] is a good set of videos for learning about fountain pens.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1AEFDC6AC935BAFC
My diary is full of entries about how I need to cut my fingernails because they're making it hard to type a diary entry.
I strengthen my writing muscle by writing down a foundational "anchor" concept at the top of the page and then writing about it in isolated chunks or paragraphs that use orthogonal approaches (i.e. changing the tone, verbosity, directness, amount of supplemental information). Then I consolidate and prune ideas until I have coherent content. This helps me form my writing style and keep it fresh and dynamic over time.
I find that giving yourself the space to express things in new ways helps your audience see how you change as a person over time, which is cool because I feel like I can understand and connect with the author or artist better because I see changes in growth and trajectory.
Also would love to hear how that process informs the experiences mentioned in your third paragraph.
Take a piece of paper (or google doc) and put a theme or idea in a single sentence or line of text at the top. Then write a chunk (I'd say 5-10 sentences, but it's arbitrary) below in whatever style naturally comes to you first. Re-read it and note any obvious characteristics about it that jump out at you (e.g. it reads like a research paper, it uses colloquial language, sentences pack a lot of information, my diction is terse, etc - whatever). Then you write a new white space-separated chunk below it where you play with a completely new style, or maybe go in the the opposite direction of something you noticed in the last chunk (be more blunt and terse when your last chunk was long and dense, or maybe introduce fun abstractions and colorful analogy when the last chunk reads like an arXiv paper).
Once you feel ready to consolidate it, re-read them and cherry-pick things from each chunk that feel right to you as the writer and synthesize the text into a final piece you are happy with. I'd say you should also timebox consolidation so you actually have something workable in a timely manner. Often times I find that this method creates a balanced style for me, because it is my best effort at emulating my favorite style to read - a style where I never feel like I have the writer "figured out".
Bear in mind that this is a completely arbitrary approach and is just how I like to do things. I came up with it from musicianship where you develop your own style by emulating one person, then another, then you have a bag of tricks to pull from when it comes time to decide who you want to be as a creator. Your style may change over time, and I think this method allows it to evolve based on what feels right to you vs. just following what has always worked or what others seem to be happy with.
1) Observe the world, pay attention to things.
2) Jot down snippets of observations/ideas in a single Google Docs document (available on almost any platform). Don't try to organize it. Keep it really simple. The key is to keep it low effort and frictionless.
3) Look over the Google Docs document from time to time. When you have enough ideas coalescing in a cluster/theme, feel them out. When the cluster feels like it's ready i.e. you feel an emotional connection to it, start writing. Important tip: don't feel you have to finish writing in one sitting -- you can stop, let your writing sit, and keep re-clustering until you have something that is worth putting out there.
Gerald Weinberg calls this the Fieldstone method [1] -- the basic idea is to continuously collect, and only write about what you care about. I think it's a useful approach. I personally don't find the streams-of-consciousness approach very compelling (didn't like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway). Streams-of-consciousness is good for very artsy-fartsy, avant-garde type works, but to me good writing comes from a lifetime of collecting experiences, observations and ideas and coalescing them.
On mistakes: I used to have a lot of anxiety about my grammar/mechanics because I'm sloppy, but I learned from an editing coach that "everybody could use a good editor". Focus on getting your ideas right -- if it's worth putting out there, you can always hire an editor to help tighten your copy. Development editors will help you build your piece, line/copy editors can fix your style and mechanics, fact-checkers can help with research on veracity. There are at least 9 types of editors, each for different stages of writing [2]. But you have to first have an idea that is worth communicating.
[1] https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/hunt-gather-...
There's nothing like spending time on a single piece to develop skills. If you start slow asking yourself questions like "How can I make this sentence/point more straightforward?" and mulling on it and revising, then your brain will start to develop those patterns quicker and you'll get better at putting thoughts directly to the page with less revision needed and you'll build confidence as you get a sense of your own style.
I have some experience in a couple of fields and deeper experience in a few, but I can't really point to any studies that would underpin any learnings or points I'd like to make and without those I feel what ever I write becomes just the ramblings of someone vaguely qualified.
I have a much easier time giving advice in person, sometimes having a couple of people invite me to observe & coach, but somehow writing feels like it requires so much more care and study that it frightens me to start.