I believe that writing is a craft. It’s something you learn to get better at the more you do it, and I’m not sure that I’m a good writer just yet.
In the past few years as I’ve moved across stages of education, I’ve learnt to have different relationships with writing as a whole:
- In secondary school, where the ability for you to write something — both situationally and in free-form — is graded, I used to have a love-hate relationship for it. Where I dreaded using writing as a skillset in exams, I enjoyed using it as a medium to pour my heart onto a page when I didn’t know how to do so with another person. I found myself writing more emotionally, connecting myself with more impulsive and spontaneous bursts of sentences. It’s likely what laid the foundation to the way I write today.
- In polytechnic, where things shifted more to IDEs and code editors, I didn’t get the chance to practice this craft for myself. I tried to keep up writing in any way I could — mostly through the blog posts that I wrote. I didn’t really enjoy the fact that, once a blog post was done, after several revisions and some rewrites, it was truly done. That, then, laid the foundation to me starting this digital garden: an evergreen, ever-living piece of writing that can be updated any time I wish.
- Now, in my years in National Service, where I find myself confined by my brain during the hours of downtime I have after the working day concludes. I’m looking more deeply into digital gardening now in the hopes of it being an avenue I can further develop my craft of writing through.
I haven’t truly reflected about the way I write, but I hope that when someone reads anything I write, they understand that it’s something that’s:
- Not AI-produced — I have been using em dashes as far back as my secondary school days, and I’ll be the first to reject the notion that em dashes are an obvious indicator of AI-generated work. It used to be the case, revealing non-human work, but I’m not certain that it serves as a reliable indicator now.
- Writing with heart and soul — I hope that I have a “special touch” when it comes to anything I’ve written; whether it’s pouring additional work into researching something or the choice of words when it comes to describing something, I hope that my writing, at the very least, feels human. That’s a lot of words that’s basically a complement (and maybe saying the same thing?) as the previous point.