Personal Reflections – Page 10

The joy in ‘writing’

Exam period in university is a time when I have to write a lot, and it feels awkward for me. Not the exams themselves per se – that‘s a story in itself – but the physical act of writing with pen and paper. Seldom, if ever, do I resort to writing on physical material. I mostly type on my netbook, or if have to make a quick note then I bash it out as a draft text message on my cellphone. I never was the type to jot down appointments in a notebook; I meticulously log upcoming and regular events on an online calendar instead so that I can access it anywhere.

Unlike other students, especially at NTU Singapore, I never print out lecture notes. Instead, I prefer to annotate PDFs using comments, drawing tools et al that PDF readers have. This, to me, is less hassle than having to print out stacks of printing notes, remembering which ones to carry on which day to which lecture, marking key points using a highlighter…only to find mere weeks before an exam that I can’t find a particular set of notes.

(This is why I love my netbook. It is light – just about one kilogram, excellent for carrying around – and it gives me 8 hours of battery life without using wifi, 5-6 hours if I do; that’s enough to last me a ‘working day’. Running Ubuntu it can boot-up in 30 seconds, but even with Windows 7 performance is not that bad except for the longer start-up time. It’s perfect for the way I live.)

For tutorial sessions I click pictures of solutions put up on the projection screen with my cellphone or digital camera and tag them by subject when I import them in to my photo manager software; this gives me an archive of tutorial sessions that I can browse through by both subject and time. I am the type of student whom e-learning departments in universities use as model students when pitching for funding for their e-learning projects.

So when I say I feel odd writing during exams, it feels odd. Since exams come, say, once in every six months you can imagine how long I go before lifting a pen. When I have to sign receipts for card transactions, I find it a struggle to sign my own name properly. This atrophy of ‘writing’ muscles (fair to call it that?) is so bad that I need to start writing on paper at least two weeks before exams to get myself habituated. The first 2-3 days are the worst; it’s like learning to write for the first time.

Here’s the thing: I love ‘writing’, in its meaning of ‘creating text’, and I do lots of it. Obviously, not as much these days on this blog, but I’m constantly ‘write-typing’ for my private blog and for personal fiction-writing projects. I have tried to do both of these activities on paper – maintaining a (physical) diary or writing short stories / scripts on paper – and every time I have walked away frustrated. Because I don’t write a lot, I am slow at it. When I write on paper, I constantly find myself lagging behind what I’m thinking I want to write now, and this irks me. I don’t face the same issue on a text editor because I can touch type comfortably at a fast rate. (I’m not going to go into a discussion on how it’s easier to edit on a computer etc because those are self-evident.)

What I am curious about, though, is whether I have developed a preference for typing because my handwriting is bad, and, whether there is any correlation between people who have ‘good’ handwriting and prefer to write on paper as opposed to people who don’t and thus gravitate towards typing. Now, not writing for long periods affects my handwriting negatively as I have seen, but it is only making a bad thing worse. Ever since middle school my teachers have been railing at me to improve it; one particular teacher even made me do cursive writing workbooks used by primary school kids because she got fed up of trying to decipher my assignment submissions.

This is just a hunch, so to get some sort of preliminary validation I asked Aditya whether he: a) owned a Moleskine b) had a good handwriting. I asked the first because I vaguely remember him mentioning it once on Twitter. Someone who owns a Moleskine surely has to be big on wanting to write on paper, and probably does so frequently as the ‘features’ of the ‘Moleskine form-factor’ – hardbound or sturdy softbound cover, elastic band to retain loose page leaves, stitched binding for durability, etc – are designed for rough or ‘mobile’ usage rather than sitting on a desk.

He replied yes to both, but as a counter-argument mentioned that Ernest Hemingway had bad handwriting even though he wrote a lot. (Hemingway was also known to be a Moleskine user.) In my opinion, this example doesn’t disprove my hypothesis – and may actually strengthen it. In Hemingway’s time, writing on paper was the only realistic option if you wanted to record thoughts on the move. Typewriters were an instrument where you sat down at a desk to type out drafts or final versions, not to record everyday musings. You certainly couldn’t – rather, wouldn’t – want to carry a typewriter around in your knapsack. You didn’t have a choice. Regardless of how legible your handwriting was, hand-writing was the quicker and more convenient option. Is that true now, though? I realise the first part of this blog post might have been tedious to read through but I did it for a reason: I wanted to illustrate how it was possible – though certainly not by all – to live divorced from paper.

Herein lies the conundrum: given the choice of different writing mediums, do people with better handwriting prefer pen and paper, even though they may be touch-typists with high typing speeds? Aditya is but one example who conforms to this hypothesis; I have other friends who do too. What I have never seen, at least within my circle of friends and acquaintances who write a lot, is someone who has bad handwriting and still prefers paper. I am restricting this to people who like writing, because people who don’t need to record considerable lengths of text will probably use whatever medium they feel more comfortable with.

(Not related but another thing I’ve noticed: most of the people I know who match this hypothesis prefer to use a pencil or an old-school fountain ink pen – rather than a ballpoint pen – almost always ‘out of personal preference’ rather than any practical considerations. I think this is because they enjoy the stimuli these instruments provide – the distinct scratching noises, the physical feedback – that is often missing when using a ballpoint. Maybe it has something to do with ‘charm’, as ballpoints could be seen as ‘practical’ instruments whereas pencils / ink pens are for ‘pleasure’; the same way book-lovers keep on harping about that goddamned ‘smell’ as a charm factor.)

Anyone willing to prove or disprove the hypothesis, with facts or examples you know of?

Addendum: By ‘good’ handwriting I mean really good handwriting. People with average handwriting swing both ways. ‘Bad’ means really bad – I usually write about 100 words on an A4-size sheet of paper; it’s that messed up.

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I am in Cambodia now, and over the next two weeks I plan to also visit Thailand (and Laos, if I can fit it in). Unlike my previous trips to other countries which usually were weekend getaways, this is a trip where my itinerary has a significant amount of ‘unplanned’ time, making it all the more important for my own satisfaction that I record what happens during my journey. When I’m travelling I do not always have access to power sockets (or enough of them) to charge up my cellphone-netbook-camera triad; this is okay for shorter trips as I can keep at least two of three of my devices charged to record my experiences. This time, however, I do not have the same luxuries, and not just out of necessity but other reasons that I will talk about later, I wanted to keep a notebook with me.

I have had Moleskine cravings earlier but not until now did I follow through on it and seriously went looking to buy one. I did find a rack of Moleskines at the bookstore, but I balked at the price. At about S$30, the Moleskines are half the price of a plane ticket that could fly my to some other part of Asia – and about three times the price of similar offerings. I eventually bought a ZeniTouch journal – sounds like a Korean smartphone but the packaging assures me that it is a highly regarded Swiss journal brand. Whatever. Clearly, in a Mac vs PC ad I’d play the PC guy.

I have written ten pages in the journal, with a lot of oh-boy-what-do-write-here-now doodles, but I think I’m getting the hang of this, and actually enjoying it. I don’t think this will improve my handwriting or that I will ever seriously switch to paper, but as a ‘staging’ medium where I make quick notes on the move and them flesh them out on a computer I think this is going to work out great.

If it doesn’t work out, I can always use it as a prop to appear pensive and pretentious at cafes.

You say ____, I say _____

(Request to my readers, especially my subscribers: There’s a question right at the end of this post which I’d appreciate if you could answer. Reading the post will help explain the context but perhaps not everyone among you has time, so I wanted to flag the question for your attention in the beginning.)

Travelling around and living in different places makes you notice certain things about a place fairly quickly. One of the first things you notice is – this is no surprise – is the way people speak. However, it takes a few months to get the idiosyncrasies down pat.

When I first went to the UK, many other Indian students hit the ground running with a ‘fake’ accent. (I, personally, have never been able to do that.) And you know what? The reason people do this, to an extent, is justified. What I have learnt through numerous interactions with British, American, Canadian – ‘Western’ friends, if you will – is that a fair number of them genuinely have a hard time understanding the Indian accent. Some tell me they may understand only three-quarters of what a person with an Indian accent, and then use context to fill in the rest.

Bet it’s the same with a majority of Indians when they watch American movies / television shows. You’ll notice how theatrical releases of films in India almost never have subtitles as is standard in practically every other country where English is not a native language, but cinemas in India cater to an upmarket or an aspirational crowd. On satellite TV movie channels, on the other hand, captioning has been so popular that all channels quickly adopted it and saw a rise in viewership. I have friends with an impeccable command over written English, yet are completely lost without subtitles when listening. An explanation offered for this is that “Westerners speak too fast” but on the other side of the pond, er, ocean, they think the exact opposite! This is probably just a case of ‘feeling’ that someone is speaking fast because you cannot catch what they are saying. Try learning a new language and you’ll always feel that native speakers speak ‘too fast’.

It can get much worse than that. I encountered situations in the UK, try as hard as they might, people couldn’t understand what I was saying. This goes both ways. For a quick headcount, how many of you can understand what comedian Kevin Bridges is saying in this video from Live at the Apollo roadshow?

(The Welsh and the Scottish accents are notoriously hard to understand, even among native English speakers from England. Shed a silent tear for me – my two roommates last semester were both Scots.)

This reminds me of a funny anecdote from first year at university. We (my batchmates and I) used to work together in the computing labs on our software engineering assignments and ended up discussions possible solutions with each other. Now, the Indian way of pronouncing ‘arrays’ is ‘ah-rays’, while the British way of pronouncing it is ‘uh-rays’. By the end of the year, I was pronouncing it ‘uh-rays’ and my English friend – a legit scouse – was saying it the Indian way!

I had an interesting debate with my current roommate (who’s from Canada) this semester. We were trying to solve a physics question when I used the trigonometrical abbreviation ‘cos’. He laughed and said the correct pronunciation is like in ‘cosine’ with the ‘-ine’ ending chopped off; I disagreed and said it’s like in the ending of ‘because’. We made a bet; the hard part came when trying to prove ourselves right. No matter how much we searched on YouTube for lectures on trigonometry (video channels such as MIT OpenCourseWare etc), none of the speakers used ‘cos’ as an abbreviation! That’s another thing I learnt that day – how pervasive the use of the full form ‘cosine’, ‘tangent’, ‘cosecant’ et al is in American English.

I eventually posted the pronunciation of ‘cos’ question on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange. Responses from the forum posters confirmed my suspicion that mine was the British English pronunciation while my roommate’s was the American / Canadian English pronunciation. As an aside, our pronunciation of hyperbolic functions is miles apart too – he pronounces ‘sinh’ similar to ‘cinch’ while I pronounce it as ‘shine’, and so on for the other functions.

But enough of maths for now. No matter how well-read you are, and regardless of whether you are a native speaker of English language or not, there will always be words whose pronunciation trips you. One common scenario is when you read a word long before you learn the correct pronunciation through real-life usage – there’s an entirely fascinating thread on EL&U StackExchange (again) on words that are said entirely unlike how they are written. Go through those pages and I’m certain you’ll discover a clutch of words you have been speaking the wrong way all this while!

Word choice is also a curiosity you notice when you meet other people on travels. For instance, in the UK when someone uses the term ‘Asian’, they usually mean someone of Indian / Pakistani / Bangladeshi origin; any other ethnic groups are specifically referred to, such as Chinese. In Canada and US on the other hand, as I often notice when talking to my (current) roommate, ‘Asian’ usually means Chinese (and sometimes Korean or Japanese) – basically, anyone with ‘Oriental-looking’ features. Other Asian continent ethnicities such as Indians are referred to specifically. This makes for hilarious misunderstandings as we both have to make a mental pit-stop every time the word is used to check whether the intent has been communicated properly.

Accent, on the other hand, is something you will naturally pick up if you spend time long enough with a group of people, just like my scouse friend who started saying ‘ah-rays’. Accents are contagious. There is no such thing, however, as ‘an English accent’. England – and in the broader sense, the UK – has a wonderfully colourful range of accents from town-to-town. What most people think is an English accent, from Hollywood movies or from American TV shows, is a close variation of Received Pronunciation. Basically, the idea of an ‘English accent’ is just like thinking all people from Russia / former Soviet Union speak the same way. :p (The only commonality, really, is they all drink vodka.)

As an Indian, you would call something an ‘accent’ if it differed from your style of speaking, but for an American there is no such thing as an ‘American accent’ because it’s all the same to them. I’ve heard people say that the Indian ‘accent’ is a lack of an accent; the example quoted was Indians pronounce ‘pi’ as ‘pie’, most Western speakers pronounce it as ‘phye’. But there’s a reason why ‘p’ is accompanied by an expelling of air in many accents, and it is to distinguish the sound from ‘b’. (Similarly, ‘t’ and ‘d’ are distinguished by aspiration when pronouncing the former.) Even when learning Mandarin, the ‘p’ / ‘b’ and ‘t’ / ‘d’ sounds are distinguished by making one aspirated. Conversing with British and American speakers you’ll quickly realise that the Indian quirk of not doing so will confuse them between, with ‘peer’ and ‘beer’, if context is missing. With the most of Western accents and the Chinese ganging up, Indians better fucking toe the line, so to speak. 😉

This is why over time people tend to unconsciously start mimicking the speech tones and styles of the country they live in. What sounds like a trivial issue is actually a major concern when due to those little quirks, someone at a sandwich shop or (especially) people on the telephone (customer service? Often based out of Ireland, Wales, or Scotland for UK companies. Fricking nightmare talking to them!) cannot follow a simple conversation.

Everyone has their own accent quirks, so how rapidly you pick up an accent, my experience suggests, is how comfortable people around you are in being able to understand what you say. That’s the strongest catalyst in bringing about accent shifts; anything else is incidental. Although for people who use ‘fake’ accents (call centre employees) the reason is not just to make oneself understood, but also to shed the stereotypes associated with an accent. L ike someone with an Indian accent is probably called Rajeev, eats curry for lunch, lives in Bangalore, et al. (This tactic doesn’t work as companies shift call centre operations in droves to Philippines instead of staying in India.)

My accent has been whacked all over the place. People you converse with regularly influence this, and when I was in the UK this meant I unconsciously picked up bits and bobs from a range of accents – thus resulting in something that approaches close to a ‘generic’ English accent. Then, I come to Singapore and I’ve to live with two Scots for months – probably picked up a bit of a Scottish accent then. (And lost it, by now. But when you’re around a Scot, it’s hard not to speak like them – it’s so contagious!) Current roommate is Canadian, who works often in New York – so a bit of that. And then come all the Singaporeans, Indians in Singapore, other exchange students say from Germany / France / Finland / Australia, Chinese-origin students who have went to Cambridge board schools…well, let’s just say my accent is a clusterfuck right now. On the bright side, I must be close to approaching a generic global accent (albeit with an underlying hint of an Indian one).

I’m fascinated by this now as performance of speech recognition engines against various accents is one of the aspects I will be researching over the summer. Here’s my question, guys: when you talk to someone with a different accent, truthfully, how much of it do you get straight away and how much do you have to fill in through context? Do you find it ‘Western’ TV shows / films hard to follow? Specifically talking about the Kevin Bridges video embedded earlier in the post – could you understand it, and to what extent? Leave your response as a comment below. It’ll be a big help getting preliminary feedback on key problems on my research topic field.