Category: onwriting

On “Talented” Being (Unintended) Blanket Praise

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When I was about 14-15 years old, my teacher told my class she believed talent was 50% natural and 50% work. She was talking about me. That year, I’d begun shooting off the grading scale in English, consistently scoring 13s. In the Danish grading system at the time, 13 was nearly impossible to get. And not in an A+ way, but in an A++++ way. It was meant to be that way. It was the ultimate grade you weren’t meant to achieve, but which was (almost begrudgingly) given to you in a “congratulations, you’ve beat the system” sorta way.

The point here is this: I believed my teacher back then.

I believed my “talent” was 50% natural and 50% hard work.

Now, however?

Now, fifteen years later, I view “natural talent” and “hard work” as synonymous—not dichotomous.

Being called “talented” feels a lot like your book being called “unique”. It doesn’t actually say a whole lot about your achievement beyond the fact that you’ve achieved. It’s like an umbrella term. It’s safe. It’s easy. It’s a blanket compliment, really. To me, calling someone “talented” feels like diminishing the time they’ve spent honing their skillset to this point. Not only that, but it makes their skill level sound unattainable to others. You put the emphasis on the result instead of the process—on what you have achieved instead of what you did to get there—which can be discouraging to other creatives. And the last thing we need in our creative industries is more discouragement among each other, am I right?

“Talent” is a work ethic, so praise the work ethic.

Praise the expertise.

Praise the niche knowledge.

Nurturing an ethic/expertise/niche knowledge sounds far less intimidating than nurturing a “talent”. It sounds accessible. Safe. Like this is something you could do, step by step, and not lose your way while doing it. It sounds like a hill to cross, not a mountain to climb.

Discourse is powerful like that.

Discourse can make us stumble—or push us along.

The once popular idea from Gladwell’s Outliers (2008) that 10,000 hours of work made you an expert has nowadays been debunked by the authors of the original study referenced in Gladwell’s books—yet I think the concept itself still holds true, even if the exact hours don’t.

Time equals expertise.

time = hard work = talent = hard work = time

And it’s different when people find this time. Some people are lucky their parents help them find it, so they get an early start, but this doesn’t mean their start is better or more valuable than someone who starts at age thirty or sixty. This brings me to my next point.

If parents recognize what their children love and help them nurture it, teaching them that spending time doing what they love is acceptable no matter what it is (and especially if that love is one the parents don’t understand themselves), then chances are the child will grow up to become an expert in what they grew up loving. What they grew up loving will become their field of expertise. Their livelihood.

Their “talent”.

Because they were encouraged to spent time on it.

Because they worked on it.

Because they loved it.

Let me end this self-indulgent blabber on the quick note that sometimes “talent” has a physical element that’s easily mistaken for natural ability. Such as a pianist having large hands, a basketball player being tall, and just being able-bodied in general. This physical elementhas nothing to do with hard work (hard work can’t give you bigger hands, or make you taller, cool as that’d be), so this element often ends up being perceived as natural ability. Which is then conflated with talent.

But I wouldn’t personally call this talent. I would call it having the upper hand. I would call it luck. Would call it recognizing your advantage.

 But that’s just me.

What about you?

Sources:
http://www.6seconds.org/2020/01/25/the-great-practice-myth-debunking-the-10000-hour-rule/

On Writing Professionally in Your Foreign Language

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When I first started writing this post, I was full of frustration.

Frustration that people often judge my online presence and opinions based on an American standard because I’m fluent in the language and (part of) the culture, yet people also dismiss English as a foreign language, calling it “easy”.

But I let my frustration cool off and returned with a clearer mind.

First, let’s differentiate between second language and foreign language.

A second language is a language that isn’t the mother tongue of the speaker, but is used for public communication, trade, higher education, administration etc. By contrast, a foreign language is any language other than the one spoken by the people of a specific location (i.e. the one you live in). The lines are blurry, to be sure, but with these definitions in mind, English qualifies as a foreign language for me. Even though Danish children these days learn English alongside Danish from their very fist school day (as with a second language), this is a recent development and thus not my experience. Besides, English is still officially labelled by the government as a “fremmedsprog” (foreign language).

While interning as an English copywriter, I was also frustrated. English was constantly dismissed because it was viewed as the dominant lingua franca of the modern age. This mentality was corrosive, resulting in poor professional copyediting because “well, anybody can write English!”

Did I mention feeling frustrated?

Let’s dig into that.

“But English is easy to learn…”

This mentality is offensive to me. This mentality is offensive to any foreign language learner in any language, trust me, so it bogs my mind that I encounter it so often on social media.

I’ve studied English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese—and they’re all hard. To become fluent in them, they’re all hard. To learn cultural equivalence, they’re all hard. To understand regional dialects, they’re all hard. The Japanese language, as an example, doesn’t use articles, nor does it have a future tense. That’s all derived from context, not grammar. Danish, as another example, doesn’t have the present participle that English has.

Learning within the same language family will always be easier, of course. Learning Spanish when you already know French will always be easier (Romance languages). Learning Danish when you already know German is easier (Germanic languages). Stepping outside of your native language family will always be harder than staying within—when we’re talking grammar and vocabulary.

But language difficulty isn’t solely derived from grammar and vocabulary.

Language has a historical and cultural aspect as well.

To become fluent in a language you have to also know the history and culture behind the grammar and vocabulary. It’s about understanding cultural equivalents, regional dialects and much more. It goes beyond language families.

And, I should add, being able to communicate by speech in one language is not the same as being able to write coherently in it, much less the same as being able to write a piece of fiction on par with native speakers.

During my MA in English & Cultural Studies, translation studies was a recognized academic field for a reason. Translation isn’t “just” translation—not even for English. There are direct translation theories (borrowing/calque/literal translation) and indirect ones (transposition/modulation/equivalence/adaptation). As these theories indicate, learning a language also means learning a history and culture that’s not your own.

That’s no “easy” feat.

During my MA, I was also graded on my consistency in oral English. I was told to choose either British English or American English, and then I got graded on my oral proficiency in the one I choose. Having lived in the US and being married to an American, I’ll tell you right now that few native English speakers bother learning that distinction the way I was forced to learn it as a foreign speaker.

And it’s not as simple as knowing whether it’s “colour” or “color”; it goes beyond grammar and vocabulary.

What is foreign language fluency, really?

Fluency has stages. Levels.

I think this is something people need to talk about more.

Fluency is an ever-developing thing, connected to more than just the language it denotes.

I first considered myself fluent in English when I stopped translating a Danish sentence in my head before I said it aloud in English. Then I considered myself fluent when I began thinking in English at random. Then when I began dreaming in English. Then when I was able to seamlessly code-switch (i.e. changing between languages in one sentence/conversation).

Which leads to another point of mine: how bilingualism creates separate identities.

How every language does this, “easy” or not.

Linguistical Identities

A growing number of scientific studies claim multilingualism creates separate personalities.

I agree with them.

Having lived in the US and being married to an American, my own experience with this is primarily Danish versus American.

I find that the culture of the language I’m speaking highlights different parts of my personality, particular those parts that the culture in question values. For example, I’m fairly extroverted in American and readily engage in small talk/new friendships, but I’m generally very introverted in Danish and avoid interacting with strangers whenever possible. This difference is stark enough that it left my husband confused when we moved from the US to Denmark because I treated my Danish social circle far more selectively than my American. I didn’t do that consciously. It was just how my personality panned out as it developed while I lived in the US.

Now, yes, personality changes/nuances/etc. don’t have to be triggered by language, that’s true.

But the fact remains that my own Danish/American personality shift specifically occurs when I shift languages. And it occurs consistently as I fly back and forth between the two countries.

I suspect part of this difference may also be that interacting in a foreign language creates a “false you”, a more objective you, so it’s easier for a habitual introvert to act as an extrovert because you feel “less real”. It’s for this same reason that I’ve always written in English rather than Danish. It’s easier to be truthful when the truth (in the shape of language) feels farther removed from you.

But let’s end on a note that draws us back to my reason for writing this post:

Engelsk er ikke “nemt”.

On the Toxicity of Twitter & Authors Migrating Away

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Lately, I’ve seen a lot of authors migrating their presence from twitter onto other social media platforms. Toxicity, doom-scrolling, mental health, and time-wasting are cited among the reasons. This raises the troubling question that if we, writers, find ourselves escaping a platform built for writing, then what does that indicate for and of the platform as a whole?

This is what I hope to partially unpack here, through the lens of existentialism.

I wrote my postgraduate thesis on Kierkegaardian and Sartrean existentialism. Kierkegaard and Sartre would’ve been all over today’s social media if they could. Social media is all about existentialism. About being perceived. It prays on your identity.

Existentialism understands identity as a process, as something that changes and develops according to the choices you make in life. On social media, groupthink robs you of your choices. Robs you of your identity. It leaves you in despair, as Kierkegaard would say. Despair arises when the self is unable to confirm itself. In order to become yourself, you must first conquer the negativity of not being yourself. You must face what you are not in order to acknowledge what you are. Otherwise, you end up in despair.

To me, this is often the nature of twitter’s toxicity.

Your choice, your identity, is robbed from you by groupthink.

In the writing community, there are specific accounts dedicated to spilling the tea and keeping you updated on the latest problematic discourse. You know, the thing that perforates your timeline, but you have no idea what it’s really about because it’s all subtweeting? Yeah, that thing.

That very unhealthy expectation, right there.

The writing community expects you to comment on every discourse that blows up. If you don’t, you’re an enabler, or a silencer, or a whole slew of other things. Now, there’s no doubt that enabling cruel behavior and that staying silent in the face of inhumanity is wrong (and I won’t go into what constitutes inhumanity because that should be obvious to everyone), but despite what the community expects, you can be on twitter without inserting yourself in every discourse that blows up. It’s okay to be on twitter and mind your own beeswax.

In an ideal world, you should be able to step away from a single discourse rather than stepping away from twitter as a whole to escape this despair. In an ideal world, groupthink should not result in a despairing self.

Lastly, we also shouldn’t discount how the pandemic has forced everyone to be online for different reasons than before. We’ve been forcefully overexposed to groupthink as a cultural consequence of the pandemic, so the toxicity has grown exponentially. The potential for our selves to despair has grown. I think we’re all feeling this, which means we need to be ever more vigilant about it.

So, don’t feel bad.

Don’t feel forced.

Don’t favor the group to the detriment of your own despair.

Don’t feel that you have to leave because you’re not “vocal enough” online. You can be vocal without doing it online, but let’s leave that discussion for a different day. Bottom line is this: avoiding toxicity in general is about building an awareness of how the toxicity works, so it can’t victimize you.

Build your awareness and you’ll build your defense.

You can start by engaging in critical thinking of online behavioral patterns, both your own and those of others.