How to play with writing: a response to a fellow blogger (Part 1)

Hello reader; we find each other again. I have an announce­ment to make. Over the last month, I found some­one very sim­i­lar, and at the same time very dif­fer­ent to me. His name is Andres Melo, and like me, he is a Colom­bian expa­tri­ate in an Eng­lish speak­ing coun­try (Canada).
Like me, he has a reflec­tive blog. Unlike me, he works in acad­e­mia instead of indus­try. And unlike me (an engi­neer by train­ing and trade), he stud­ied Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy and is well versed in the clas­si­cal and con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers. His lat­est post prompted me to write a com­ment in his blog. But this com­ment grew; and grew; and grew! Sud­denly, I realised what I had was not a com­ment; but instead an entire new post for my blog. And I had only cov­ered the first topic of two that I orig­i­nally envi­sioned leav­ing as a response to his insight­ful essay. As a result, I have decided to post that entry here, and refer him (using the com­ments sec­tion of his post) to come over and join us in this place.

I encour­age you to read his essay before you come back to fin­ish read­ing this entry; and the next one. You will have a greater under­stand­ing of my words and mes­sages if you decide to fol­low my advise. I hope you enjoy this reflec­tion, and that you will at least give Andres’ blog a try. It is a fas­ci­nat­ing, if some­times long, read.

–The crazy Colombian

REFLECTIVE COMMENT #1 — ON WRITING STYLES

As you know, I was born in Colom­bia. I lived there until age 24. Then I migrated to Syd­ney, and have been liv­ing here for 13 years.

You will also remem­ber how I love writ­ing. To those that know me in real life, this is strange in a way, given how I have always been clas­si­fied as a ‘num­bers per­son’ . I am an engi­neer, after all; My work­place is a bank; and my work regards ‘mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics’ using sophis­ti­cated sta­tis­ti­cal techniques.

Yet I have expe­ri­enced a deep stream of lit­er­acy in my life. I have writ­ten short poems. I have writ­ten small essays. I have writ­ten aca­d­e­mic papers (none of which were pub­lished, by the way). I have writ­ten short stories.

I have also read. A lot. All types of books. Seri­ous books. Friv­o­lous books. Short, tall, thick, thin books. Fic­tion and Non-Fiction; From thrillers to biogra­phies. I have enjoyed busi­ness books, sci­ence fic­tion books, and real sci­ence books. You name any style, and it is almost for sure I can find at least one book from the genre that has gone through my hands.

Sorry, I kind of went on a tan­gent there. There is a rea­son why I men­tion this deep inter­est in let­ters, this pas­sion of mine for words. Through­out the last 13 years, I was forced to be more aware of my nat­ural writ­ing style. Through this increased aware­ness, I have come to the con­clu­sion that Span­ish is a ‘flow­ery’ lan­guage. Take a book by any of our highest-ranked writ­ers: Gar­cia Mar­quez; Laura Esquivel; Isabel Allende, or any other of your choice. Then observe the length of their phrases; the lengthy, some­times incred­i­bly tor­tu­ous path of descrip­tion and nar­ra­tive that are used to describe the sit­u­a­tion at hand; the com­plex minu­tiae of the moment they are try­ing to cap­ture in sim­ple and some­times not-so-simple words. Go back and look at Andres’ own essay, the one that prompted me to think again about this. Observe the length and rich­ness of his phrases. Then come back and con­trast them with the first part of these reflec­tions. Do you notice a dif­fer­ence? Long vs short. Beauty vs util­ity. I have found that Eng­lish is a much more util­i­tar­ian lan­guage, as a gen­eral rule. And I have noticed how much bet­ter I express myself in Eng­lish when I force myself to write shorter phrases. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are ways to embed beauty in short Eng­lish sen­tences. There are great poets. Great writ­ers. Great Eng­lish mas­ters who use a style of writ­ing that goes through sim­i­larly com­plex paths as those of our Spanish-writing col­leagues. By the same token, there are Span­ish speak­ing writ­ers with hor­ren­dously long phrases; with phrases which have no beauty and are hard to under­stand; with phrases made obscure through a lack of pauses and punc­tu­a­tion. Yet my obser­va­tion still stands. As one that likes to call him­self an Omega type of indi­vid­ual, I have also exper­i­mented with both styles. And in the process, I have achieved a higher aware­ness of the pos­si­bil­i­ties. I have also enjoyed the jour­ney of dis­cov­ery, and admired it for is beauty and the plea­sure that it gave me. Like a sur­geon that is awed by the beauty of his draw­ings of the human body; this engi­neer has at times been awed by the beauty of his rumi­na­tions in a dif­fer­ent language.

I encour­age you to try it out. There is no ‘write’ or ‘wrong’ (yes, I mis­spelled that on pur­pose). Try a dif­fer­ent voice, and enjoy laugh­ing at your­self if it sounds typ­i­cally
bur­lesque. Admire it if it sounds beau­ti­fully dif­fer­ent. Ignore it if it sounds hon­estly
annoy­ing. But play nev­er­the­less. You will find your­self a more rounded indi­vid­ual for the experience.

Tagged as: Essays, Ideas, Philosophy, Reflections