It was a warm, pleasant Wednesday afternoon. After a few hours of concentrated research work, I felt a little hungry. Thinking that there was still abundant food in the fridge, I decided to go home for a simple dinner—I had the privilege of a ten-minute commute time since I moved to the city centre two months ago. At six thirty, I was seated at the office desk again. A small red dot just sprang up from the ‘’Mail’’ icon. It must be the comments from my supervisor on our paper. I cheerily said to myself and swiftly opened the email. The iteration rounds represent the first step towards an academic publication. I just started my second year of PhD, and had been longing to make a paper together with my supervisor, who is an established professor. Though I was certain that reading the comments would make me feel the urge to go back to school and learn to use words from zero. It was hard enough to write something worth reading. More arduous still for my supervisor, he had been under perpetual requirement to correct the first draft for every student, then another iteration, just one other iteration, just one iteration more, before he could stop. I’d imagine him countless times flicking aside his irritations and reading on.
Pity my supervisor. I surely tormented him at the beginning of my PhD with vacuity, banality, irrelevance, and plain old madness in my writing. I am ashamed to say, I don’t know if I have stopped doing it now. In my very first research report, for the definition of a cellular automaton I wrote ‘’A configuration of a cellular automaton is a function from the cellular space to the state set’’. The word function was visibly circled out on the comments I received. Only after several discussions did I see the justice of the remarks. Regarding the manner of my writing, the most urgent was the lack of concreteness and preciseness. I was determined to endeavour to improve my writing skills. Inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s account of his writing exercise by imitating volumes of a daily London journal, I downloaded some past publications by the lab and articles by well-known mathematicians, read them over and over, and wished to imitate them. So, I compared every paragraph in my reports with some of the papers on the logical structure and on the language, discovered some of my faults, and fixed them. Then I laid the revised paragraphs by a few days, and, when I had pretty well forgotten the influence from the papers, compared them against some other ones. I also felt the need for a richer vocabulary, so I taught myself the roots and affixes of English words from the textbook New Concept English by L. G. Alexander. I even picked from those long hours of practice the habit of writing consistently on a daily basis. At one point, writing turned into an enjoyable experience for me. Then I decided to start a blog to record my research journey in words.
All right, I am a bit carried away at this point. I even start fancying that I am a tolerable writer, about which I feel ashamed. Just now I accidentally click open the document of comments from my supervisor. Thirty-nine pages of comments in radiant red ink, only for my forty-page report…
“Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.”
