Writing for a specific discipline

When we learn a new thing, there is always a phase of acculturation. At first, we don’t feel comfortable but with time and training, it becomes better. It is especially the case when we learn a specific discipline, as I am currently doing with technical communication thanks to my master’s degree.

• ·         Identity crisis

This year, I am discovering what technical communication is. I did not realize there were so many specific rules when I applied for this master program. Even if courses started almost six months ago, I still feel lost and uncomfortable with this discipline. I still do not understand how technical communication works and I feel really incompetent.

Furthermore, technical communication is a discipline where English dominates. A lot of students are bilingual and have studied abroad during their bachelor years. I did not have this opportunity and my English is not as good as theirs. Even if I can understand when teachers speak in English, I need a lot of time to do exercises and I make several mistakes.

Also, I do not participate in class because everything that I would say would be simple and I would not be able to transcribe my thoughts as they are. I hope it is just difficult because it is the beginning and that, next year, it will be easier. In the end, this situation brings a lot of stress, accentuated by expectations of people.

•  Culture bound

Even if I am not bilingual in English, I am graduated with a bachelor of communication and I am supposed not to have difficulties with courses related to it. Nevertheless, I still need to learn things with design software for example.

Besides, I specialized in literature when I was in high school and even after for my bachelor, I was trained to do long sentences, using metaphors and lot of words to express one idea. But with writing in technical communication, we are currently learning how to use “minimalism” which consists in using the less words as possible. I think it is very hard to synthetize when we are not used to.

My academic culture is still controlling me and it will require quite some time for me to accommodate to technical communication rules.

• ·        To have a goal

I think it is very important to have a goal to stay motivate when we learn new things. It can rapidly become difficult and if we do not know why we do this, it will be easy to give up. My goal is to write in technical communication in order to obtain my master’s degree.

“Goals are your destinations in life; objectives are the stops along the way.” 
― Gerard de Marigny, The Watchman of Ephraim

Therefore, it is easier to accommodate when we have support from friends and family. Even if I do not live with my parents anymore, I often talk to them on the phone and it is very helpful when I have identity crisis. It is normal to experiment different steps during the process of acculturation and time is our best friend to go from one step to another, through objectives.

I might be an outsider in technical communication but I hope to become an insider in a few months. It is my challenge from my graduation in 2016: to be proficient in technical communication (and I hope I will be since it is supposed to be my future job!).

Writing style

Our culture influences our writing. But what role does it really play? What does it change concretely? This article is about the scope of language we think with.

• ·         European, Asian or African writing style?

People can guess were we come from regarding our writing style. For instance, in the western languages, we use Latin alphabet whereas Russians use Cyrillic alphabet. If French is read from left to right, Arabic and Hebrew, on the contrary, are read from right to left. Symbols are really important, especially in Asian languages. Furthermore, American people put a lot of space between letters whereas French does not. There are various writing styles reflecting particular cultures.

As Alton L. Becker said: 

“Writing involves more than technology, and more than most would call language”.

Indeed, it is true that our culture has changed. It changed from orality to writing and printing to another form of orality with television (Walter Ong). Technology has brought a form of standardization in our writing style. We have different rules to respect according to the support we use (newspapers, blogs, novels, scripts for videos…). However, we have our own personality which is reflected in our style. Writing involves more than rules and technology, it highlights our culture and our human-being.

• ·         Language and graphocentrism

When we learn a new language, graphocentrism (an unconscious interpretative bias in which writing is privileged over speech) is very powerful, especially in France. If we are so bad at languages although we learn English for ages, it is partially because we do not speak enough. At school, we study grammar rules, irregular verbs and conjugation but we become very uncomfortable when it comes to speaking. However, when we use phonetic writing (like pinying with Chinese) it is not the same than when we write the right way (with symbols in this case). To learn a language, it is better to speak and to write it. We use both in everyday life, they are complementary and it permits to understand the culture behind the language.

When I started learning Chinese four years ago, I was very anxious about writing with symbols. I had never done that before and it was new and very different from using Latin letters. Finally, I was glad when we were shown how to use “pinying” (the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet). I did not have to know every symbols to remember words, I could write them in phonetics. However, my teacher was really mad about it and I did not understood why. I thought she was just annoyed because she had to teach us symbols and we weren’t very cooperative. Now I understand better why she reacted that way. By ignoring the right way to write words in Chinese with symbols, I was denying a huge part of this culture. I did not pay attention to the meanings of symbols. I thought that they were just too hard to remember. When I look back, we did the same thing with colonization when we forced people to give up their languages to adopt ours.

At the end, literacy involves more than reading and writing. It includes all the cultures behind it. Now I understand more the role my culture and my cultural identity play in my writing style thanks to my experiences with other languages as Chinese or even English (it is so hard for me to write 7 without the bar!).