A colleague of mine once uttered these words. I don’t believe he intended them to become legendary, but within my circle of friends they most certainly are and, I think, rightly so.

What is a word anyway?

Words are abstract constructs. Their substance has no relevance to their meaning. By that I mean that a sound, letter, phoneme, morpheme or word has no intrinsic meaning attached to it save that which the human mind attributes to it. “Walk” could mean the same as “run”, but why doesn’t it? It’s because we have created a different meaning for each. As we grow up from childhood, we learn that different sounds have different meanings, and so we accept these sound-meaning relationships without question. When we learn a language, we are conditioned to associate certain sounds with certain meanings.

Some words are spelled and pronounced the same but can have many different meanings, for example, the word “bank”. How we differentiate contextual meanings with multi-meaning words is an on-going hot topic amongst linguists and lexicographers, but that’s for another post…

Although words are abstract constructs, the association between the sound of a letter or mixture of letters (words), has become entrenched in our understanding of words and how they are used in conjunction with each other to form meaningful sentences, which in turn help us to convey ideas and concepts, although the extent of how much we can convey meaning is extremely limited. This process forms the basis of all our written and oral communication.

Certain words, regardless of language, are similar in different languages.

How can this be? All languages are categorised into families and hence, have hereditary traits. For millennia, people have migrated from country to country, continent to continent. During this, cultures mingled and languages merged. There is no such thing as a pure race. We are all of each other.

Because of this migration, neighbouring cultures share similar language traits. The scale of this is huge. For example, some members of Siberian tribes crossed over the ancient land bridge between far Eastern Russia and Alaska and migrated to South America, and now some South American cultures share some language traits with those still spoken in Russia.

However, this epic fact doesn’t negate the fact that words are dodgy things. What does dodgy mean? Well, it can mean “deceiving”. We may not mean to deceive when we use words, but it is often an un-meant and un-desired side-effect, even when we think we have chosen our words with care. Like it or not, this is inevitable, so it means we have to take special care in choosing the words we use.

As I see it, every human being likes and deserves to be treated with decency. Isn’t this a basic human right? The words we use go a long way, and their impact is vastly underestimated by many people. We shouldn’t think just of how we think we would like to be spoken to, but, more importantly, how we think someone else would like to be spoken to. To achieve this demands supreme concentration and dedication. This one of the reasons why Gautama Buddha rated Right Speech as one of the most important things a human being must pay special attention to and try to master. Try it for just one day and you’ll soon see how difficult it is. You will feel a sense of achievement even in trying. But, persevere: you and those around you will benefit enormously. For my partial take on Right Speech see Part 2 of my article The Unfolding Script of Speech and Language.

One problem with words is that once we crystallise our thoughts into words, the subtleties of meaning become lost or distorted very easily. When we speak or write, how often are we happy that what we have communicated is what we were really thinking? Once we communicate via words, we are, to a degree, at the mercy of the listener or reader’s understanding and perception.

From my point of view, this goes right to the heart of the problem of language: language, written or spoken, plays second fiddle to thought. Thoughts are far superior in accuracy, potency and meaning compared to written or spoken language.

So how is all this relevant in our daily lives?

For most of us, not a day passes when we don’t use either the written word or spoken word. Imagine you had only 100 words (it may seem a lot, but it really isn’t) to use, either written or spoken, each day.

You’d soon learn to choose them pretty carefully.

“See it all, till tomorrow”

An English professor wrote the words:

‘A woman without her man is nothing’ on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly*.

All of the males in the class wrote:

‘A woman, without her man, is nothing.’

All the females in the class wrote:

‘A woman: without her, man is nothing.’

I’ve been planning to write a post on the importance of spelling and punctuation for a while, and this has spurred me on to get it written and posted, so stay tuned!

But until then…

As I read and re-read this anecdote, I got thinking about how we punctuate not just our writing, but also our speech. How would you speak both of the above lines to convey the meaning of their written punctuation? Try speaking both out loud to someone and see if they can grasp the different meanings you’re trying to get across.

OK! Technical stuff coming up!

The key lies in emphasising specific morphemes**,  where to put pauses and how long to pause. It’s got to be perfect, like comic timing, for it to work.

When we speak a polysyllabic word, we can emphasise whatever morpheme or syllable we choose to change the importance of what part of the word we are speaking. It can even change the meaning of an entire phrase, sentence, or diatribe.

The simplistic beauty of this is that the meaning of the word as a whole remains intact, but that meaning is altered subtly but powerfully by what morpheme we choose to emphasise.

This is a very strong force in speech. Whether we write or speak, to quote Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars when about to enter a dangerous scenario, “we must be cautious.”

*The use of the word “correctly” in this anecdote is interesting. There is no correct punctuation unless we know the context of the sentence. Without context, it’s entirely open to interpretation.

**A morpheme is a part of a word, often a syllable, that has meaning and also forms a part of a word. I couldn’t be bothered thinking up my own example, so here’s an explanation I’ve adapted from Wikipedia:

The word “unbreakable” has three morphemes: “un”, “break”, and “able”. Each one has a different meaning, but when put together in this order forms a new word.

“See it all, till tomorrow”

His reply: “a writer writes.”

That, to me, is pure genius. Genius most often lies in taking a complex idea and making it simple. It’s all about attitude, in my opinion. If you want to write, start writing. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering stuff. Above all, be yourself and just put something down. If you’re not happy with it, change it. If you think your story, article or blog is going nowhere, just take a break and revisit it when you’re in the mood. Don’t force it. Do it when you want to, you’ll enjoy it more, and the result will be more pleasing to you and your readers.

“See it all, till tomorrow”

Writer’s block is something all writers face at some time. Your mind goes blank and your brain just doesn’t work, just like trying to run in a dream. Your mind wills your body to move at the speed you want it to, but you just don’t move fast enough. If writing is your job, this can be not only frustrating, but you have to get that piece written, edited and published, or your boss will give you a good spanking.

Just saying to your boss, I’ve got “writer’s block” probably won’t get you out of that pot of boiling water. Anyone who’s ever written anything knows that writer’s block comes unannounced and that it is crippling. But we’ll deal with writer’s block in another post…

On to the dreaded blank page…

Whenever you start a new writing project, one thing is inevitable: a blank first page.

If your mind is brimming with ideas, it’s no problem to bang words out. Sometimes we all have these days, but sometimes we don’t.

So…here’s a short but effective checklist to add to your writing arsenal:

One of my Writing Commandments (no “Ten Commandments” here; we’ll just see how it goes…) of writing is: It’s easier to work with something than nothing. So, even if it’s the biggest load of crap you’ve ever written, write it anyway. It does no harm, you can always delete it, but it’s something to work with, edit, mould, and more often than not, yields ideas you never even suspected. Never forget, you can’t edit a blank page. Also, no-one wants to reads a blank page. So write SOMETHING!

Write down in 2-3 sentences EXACTLY what you want to accomplish.

Pick key headings and write them down.

Do a bit of light research on the subject and put your notes and any good referential urls under  the headings.

Don’t work from top to bottom. If you find any good info, put it into your own words and save your work. But if you find something relevant to another sub-heading, go ahead and add it in to the appropriate place. You’ll thank yourself later.

Just work your way through your headings, adding content little by little.

Once you’ve got a good amount of content, review your work. You’ll be amazed at what you’ve  actually accomplished.

Start your first edit, trimming away any irrelevant content.

Re-read.

If you feel you need more detailed content, do more research and add accordingly (this is sounding more like a cooking recipe!)

Re-read again (the best chefs ALWAYS taste as they go).

Edit again.

If you’re happy, run a spell check. However, DO NOT rely on it. Read it through after you do a spellcheck because spell checker’s aren’t as intelligent as you are. Better still, get a friend or colleague to read it. Any good, professional writer will take constructive criticism onboard and make appropriate changes to the piece. You may want to say something with a particular slant, but the spellchecker might have wanted to change it.

So, now you should have a written piece that you should be happy with. It’s hard work writing, but the rewards are immense, not only for you, but, hopefully also for your readership.

Good luck.

“See it all, till tomorrow”

Why do, or should, we write? Well, we write to communicate ideas. OK, so why not just talk to someone face to face? Answer: it’s not always possible, the main reason is geographical location.  The written word circumvents this.

The written word not only makes it possible for us to write a letter, e-mail, text, or internet content, it lasts longer than the spoken word. For sure, “words are dodgy things”, as they can be misinterpreted and taken out of context, but the written word is historically more reliable than the spoken word, partly because it can be referenced from source material.

It’s up to historians and keen amateurs to offer interpretations of meaning. Letters and documents hundreds of years old still exist today in personal and national archives and libraries. They are studied by scholars and the layman day-in, day-out. Every word is pored over and analysed for meaning and intent. If the Internet Archive is anything to go by, doesn’t this mean that every word we write for the internet or any other print medium carries significant weight, not only for the present but for posterity? Of course it does.

So where does Zen come in (what does it mean anyway?) and how does an ancient philosophy fit in with writing in the 21st century…?

“See it all, till tomorrow”