By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)
Some people including a few of my pupils and friends told me in the flesh that writing is as easy as falling off a log; this would be done just with a dictionary. I do not think that I only can decide whether the task of writing is that easy. It might be true that writing is a piece of cake for some, but not for me. Writing in English, my second language, seems okay with me to some extent, whereas in Myanmar, my mother tongue, looks quite difficult for me, honestly. Of course, writing is not as easy as most people think – this can be proved simply by trying a piece of writing off one’s own bat. Significantly, a beginner writer will encounter spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, thematic flaws, and even auto-stop writing, that is, he cannot think about other subject-related ideas any longer whilst writing, one way or another for sure. The last case sometimes occurs in even a number of experienced writers, by years or until their death. In the main, too much time should be spent on writing and nobody can say that one’s writing will turn out to be his success. All too often writing is an uneconomic job. This means that earning a living as a writer is all about running the risk. Also under our eyes, there are a whole lot of writers who are not recognized in the world of literature while having written for ages.
A person who wants to write must first have writing readiness. That writing readiness comes from nothing but reading enough, in my own experience. After having read enough, a willingness to write comes naturally to a future writer. In fact, reading matter is no easy task as most thought; it is a sort of art after which a reader should have gained something – knowledge, skill, attitude, or behavioural change at least. Otherwise, reading will be merely a waste of time. The readers who would like to lead a writer’s life in the future even have to put more concentration on reading material than average ones. Efficient writing usually comes out of effective reading, actually. Often seasoned readers become writers to the core in that their input skill `reading´ may stimulate the output skill `writing´ for certain. Writers are no different from ordinary people, but they have better six senses of aesthetics, viz. sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and thought, as well as an intricate choice of language expressions and stylistic features for their works of literature. Noticeably enough here, real writers are not the same as doctrinaire people, as Sayama Ma Sanda said. It stands to reason that the writer tends to tell authentic truths or even his personal likes in an honest way, but hardly tries to speak out his self-biased beliefs or policies either consciously or unconsciously. A perfect piece of writing is particularly free from spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, thematic flaws, ambiguity, unclarity, and irrelevance of subject matter. As a matter of fact, a great writing piece covers logic, reasoning, public knowledge, universal truths, global peace, simple language, and model writing. Subject matter by writers broadly depends on a) academic fields such as education, medicine, or law, b) science and technology, and c) imaginary world. Despite being founded on imagination, good subject matter is never made in a vacuum. As Saya Aung Thin stated, if a writer’s knowledge is clear so is his thought which will then contribute to his explicit writing.
To be able to write has to begin with to learn to read as a writer. Regular readers read for pleasant feelings enjoyment and general knowledge absorption, though advanced readers read for the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of a written theme, i.e., they will be capable of explaining why they like or dislike this theme both subjectively and objectively. Most starter readers take up their reading habit with the themes that interest them, especially comics, cartoons, and stories; even a few readers still enjoy cartoons until they grow old. Apparently, young readers love flat characters, although adult readers prefer rounded characters to flat ones in a story. Youth readers enjoy poems, romance, comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy and philosophy. As the reading age is getting longer, some readers like sheer old-fashioned literature or classics including poetry and drama; others go for religious teachings alone. On top of that, skilled readers will never get lost under the spell of writers. Instead, they are given to watching how on earth the writers have created their works of art with curiosity, humour, adventure, suspense, or hints in order to reach the desired purpose critically. And again, the reading process can be conducted from three points of view: literature, language, and linguistics, or language history, linguistic forms, and literary criticism. This is how to read by a clever reader as well as by an intelligent writer.
A writer frequently makes spelling mistakes. Anyone who considers himself or herself a writer is fully responsible for his or her writing material. The spelling mistakes of writing material are the need for its writer himself, not the editor’s. As the proverb says, to err is human. However, a writer should not make the same spelling mistake again due to the fact that only learned readers will know how to correct any spelling mistake and read through some writing material. To my eye, avoiding spelling mistakes in English requires keeping dictionaries or thesauri close at hand, getting aware of similar words in structure, like `quite´ and `quiet´, memorizing spelling with the right final consonant sounds, such as words ending in `-s, -sh, -ch, -ct, -t, -d´, or correct pronunciation, for instance, `form´ and `from´. Strange to say, some doctors admit to their spelling mistakes about medical terms. I have heard that anyone was fined for spelling mistakes in the past field of Myanmar literature. A minor mistake of spelling does not change the theme of writing sometimes but it is best if a writer does not make a spelling mistake nevertheless.
Native writers usually have no grammatical errors in writing just because they have automatically learnt their grammar from spoken or written words since their childhood. Foreign writers need to study grammar with the intention of writing, most notably essential grammar in use at least. At that time, they like to mix their second grammar up with the first language, as a linguistic disturbance. It is alleged that writing needs no grammar at all, but it would be possible if a language user has read enough, a lot, or if he has ever lived in a language-speaking country for a long time. As far as I am aware, grammatical errors in English deal with article usage, tense sequence, subject-verb agreement, and lexical redundancy as in `Walking is a good exercise´, `It is starting raining´, `What makes you happy? ´ and `I will discuss about grammar´. If written correctly, those sentences must be `Walking is good exercise´, `It is starting to rain´ or `It starts raining´, `What makes you happy? ´ and `I will discuss grammar´, of course. This gives rise to an important point that solely a good command of grammar in a language cannot be expected to provide writing well.
Rather than spelling mistakes and grammatical errors mentioned above, the biggest misconduct of a writer can be deemed thematic flaws. The thematic flaws may include vocabulary misusage, subject matter deviance, incorrect information, and amorphous writing style. First, vocabulary misusage means that a writer is not able to use lexis in terms of linguistic nature and educational fields. Second, subject matter deviance mainly relates to philosophical and logical facts, that is, a writer cannot tell any kind of philosophy or logic to the core in the right way. Third, incorrect information refers to the wrong description of a personal profile or regional knowledge. Fourthly, an amorphous writing style suggests a manuscript with incomplete features of a written form. In my view, an essay is a type of writing between those articles and short stories. If a writer cannot make an essay, it will turn into an article or a short story. The essay is a little gentle work of literature that readers cannot make sense of its ethics or aesthetics straight away. Overcoming the four thematic flaws calls for mastery of subject matter and language.
Above all, writing should be a permanent job. Only a person who writes is a writer, really. The very writer will be rarely of the opinion that once a writer, always a writer. On the days when writing is not done, a writer has to read or think about something to write, at the very least. He ought to always remember that writing takes time, in short. Some world-famous writers go sightseeing for an ideal setting for years before their masterpieces. Firstly, writers need to choose which type of the main theme and then the writing style. If a writer wants to write an article, he must have got the format of the article as well as facts and figures of the article. Some subject matter could do with academic writing. Secondly, the writer needs to be proficient in the use of theme-related expressions. This can be done by studying vocabularies in relation, in clusters of the same kind, under an academic field, according to parts of speech, or together with synonyms, homonyms, antonyms, irregular verbs, phrasal verbs, idioms, and collocations. Writers learn the art of writing from common mistakes so as not to make un-language expressions. They will have to use different dictionaries of language effectively and efficiently. What is more, they had better keep monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, and multilingual dictionaries in hand. A good dictionary tends to put in language-to-language definitions and sample sentences. In particular, dictionaries should be used if contextualized meaning and guessing ability do not work or even if there is adequate time to look up words in the dictionaries. As the English proverb goes, ‘Practice makes perfect´; it exerts a great influence on language practice. No sooner has a writer studied the theme and its respective vocabularies to some extent than he should write them down on his own terms, no matter how those vocabularies are linked to one another in a paragraph. After that, the writer had best ask his reliable friends and teachers for feedback on his writing or do self-reflection with the help of valid resource books. Be ready to write quite soon!
Instead of spelling and grammar, a writer’s main error can be thematic issues, such as vocabulary misuse, off-topic content, misinformation, and unclear style.
