Do I like writing? In the past, I’d say no. But now? I’m not sure.

When I was a primary school student, writing was boring. I was much less patient than I am now, and I hated memorizing phrases that I didn’t use often. Remembering the correct combinations of prepositions or idioms? That’s boring. How could I remember phrases that I seldom used outside the examination rooms? Creating sentences with these phrases? How could I make these sentences when I couldn’t remember them in the first place? Fortunately, dictation sounds rhythmic enough for me to memorize some Chinese phrases and sentences, so the issue was less significant in my Chinese writing.

When I entered the secondary school, things didn’t change much. I still didn’t need to use English in my daily life, and there was little motivation for me to remember phrasal verbs and English vocabularies. Reading South China Morning Post, the English newspaper in Hong Kong? While it was a good English newspaper, its frontline stories were often too long and too serious for my younger self to read. The topics in that newspaper were also less interesting than my science and geography textbooks that were also written in English. As a result, my English vocabularies in my favourite subjects did grow, but my knowledge in phrasal verbs, idioms and daily English words remained unchanged. While my teachers did teach writing skills well and other classmates benefited from them well, my lack of phrasal verbs, idioms and motivation to write well continued to limit my writing skills. I preferred to read Chinese newspapers and books from the library which always took less time to read. Luckily, writing good Chinese eassys does not require multitude of Chinese idioms. As far as I kept the topic of my writing to be the relevant to my homework and used the daily Chinese vocabularies, I could get good scores in my Chinese writing exams and exercises. While I did not hate writing Chinese essays, writing English eassys was still a burden for me.

After graduating from the secondary school, I began my university life. That’s the time that I started to write in English exclusively. During the entire 4 years of undergraduate education, I only had one Chinese course and there were not many opportunities to write in Chinese. I also typed Chinese much more slowly than my current self that I would avoid Chinese writing as much as I could. However, similar to my secondary school days, the growth of my vocabularies related to my major did little to the improvement of my English writing skills.

Things started to change when I moved to the US for my graduate study. I used English much more often than I used to be. I began to use the phrasal verbs and idioms that I struggled to memorize since my childhood. I also started to be bothered by the amount of suggested changes made by my supervisor and peers to my reports and papers. Shouldn’t I be able to write concisely and precisely when I graduated with a PhD? It would be nonsense to be a PhD that couldn’t write!

While I started to be aware of the importance to write well, it was not easy for me to improve my writing. I started to read books about how to write well, but I still found them boring. Friends who were really good at writing gave me some advices, but I still failed understand what good writing is. I went to the Purdue Writing Lab to get some advices on my writing, but I still couldn’t get how to write well. I even received comments from other Chinese that our English writing was actually easier for Chinese to read and I should feel comfortable about it.

The game changer was the quote “Writing is thinking on paper” from William Zinsser’s book “On Writing Well”. While I am no philosopher, I was pretty proud of myself to be a logical person, but this quote was a slap on my face. If I couldn’t write well, I couldn’t think well on paper. If I couldn’t think well, how could I claim myself to be a logical person? That’s the time when I started to pay attention to the use of words in a sentence, the sequence of sentences in a paragraph, the order of paragraphs in a section and the organization of sections in a paper. I started to be careful with the choices of words. If the sentences did not sound logical with the definitions of the words, there must be a problem in my writing. If there were combinations of words that others could not understand, there must be a problem with my thinking. That’s the time when I started to recall what I learned in my secondary school days and apply the techniques they taught to my writing carefully. Since I learned that writing well was important for thinking well, I began to be interested in how to improve my writing and hence thinking process. I began to attend writing workshops voluntarily to improve my writing. I began to be able to finish books about writing skills. I began to use my writing skills to verify my thinking process.

My writing is far from perfect. There is still a long way to go before I can claim that I write well, and there is probably a longer way before I would claim myself to like writing. At the very least, I can understand why some seniors in my field, who hated writing, like to write a lot now.