The other day, I was sitting in this outmoded café that I’m preferring over its modern counterparts lately. The owner has set up his chessboard in a corner, and I’ve made that my space. I was solving a “Fischer versus Petrosian (1971)” when a couple walked in, breaking all the silence in the house. They were photographers. Yes, the cameras dangling from their shoulders were hard to miss.
They were having such an intense argument, that I had to abandon my practice and overhear. Believe me, I could not make the head from its tail. They were struggling with words themselves. It was painful to see them walk away without striking a consensus later.
“How do I say this?”
You often experience a constraint when you feel clarity on an idea, but it just doesn’t transform into words. In a casual conversation with a like-minded friend, you may get away with it. But in case of an interview or a viva, you'll be in serious trouble.
Consider this - every day, you reach out and grasp objects like your glass of water sitting at a corner of your desk. This glass is sitting amidst many objects (or obstacles) between your hand and the target- “the glass”. But your hand employs an accurate configuration of fingers for the glass to fit in it.
Likewise, while studying “information processing models”, Rumelhart (1977) discovered ‘multiple constraints’ that operate between syntax and semantics. You would already know that syntax constrains the assignment of meaning. Thus, without the syntactic rules of English grammar, for example, it would be quite difficult to understand the intended meaning, such as in this sentence:
“The boy the man chased kissed the girl”.
It’s not only the absence of knowledge of grammar that inhibits you to find the right word for a particular thought. There are perceptual constraints too, about which I will talk in another letter. With such constraints in constant play, how do we articulate thought?
“How do you know this?”
You store knowledge in structures termed as scripts (Schank, 1976), frames (Minsky, 1975), or schemata (Norman & Bobrow, 1976; Rumelhart, 1975). When an event is experienced, you remember it for later reference. So, we develop an understanding of a wide variety of standard situations by storing information in a structured form. For example, you would rarely find a relative laughing at a funeral.
A particular event could not be assigned strictly to a single script. Thus, we have various sources of information that simultaneously interact with each other. This process is at the heart of how knowledge is stored in the brain.
“I don’t have time to write.”
What else could you do to operate in the face of paralyzing complexity? How would you make sure that you crack an interview? What would say to convince your employer for a raise?
What would you say to your highly disagreeable partner to strike a bargain? How would you break the bout of procrastination that has persisted for 6 months? How would you start a small business? How would you participate in a group discussion that is happening between friends of your friend?
How would you beat the gut-wrenching fear of failure? How would you prepare for the chaos boiling beneath a thin surface on which you’ve just learnt balance? How would prepare for an emergency that’s around the corner? How do you know you won’t freeze when all the monsters you dread come rushing?
You will write. Start small with a tiny, cute little journal. It may not be a grand idea, and it may be without purpose initially. Write one sentence for a week. Answer simple questions like, “how did your day go?”
The idea is to teach yourself that writing is not so difficult. When a habit seems to be forming, begin writing with a defined purpose. I write to help people with what I have learnt in my discipline. Similarly, there is at least one such area in your life which you have command over.
“Read more, write less.”
Writing for therapeutic reasons can help you see yourself clearly. But, people have no interest in reading your personal journal. And if writing is a creative endeavour, it must be praised for reinforcement. So, you will start writing more seriously, like a blog. The trick to mesmerising your readers is to know at least 3 times more than them. That means you must read 3 times more than your average reader.
Multiple sources of information would facilitate comprehension. Reading about a particular topic from 3 different perspectives, therefore, gives you more confidence and a sense of authority. Consequently, your written work would organise ideas in your brain and verbal material would be ready for an impactful speech in future.
Take this common case for an example.
“All gender is a social construct”.
This is a post-modern argument that essentially states that, gender is socially constructed; so that a particular gender can maintain a position of dominance. [I am taking only this case as an example here because I’ve come across hundreds of young individuals who have been swept away by this idea. I’m also certain, 99% of them have not examined it beyond half an article on an average.]
Why? Did you consider the biological components of gender? What about temperamental differences? Or did you forget that gender roles are older (2.95 million years) than political societies themselves?
It would have been better to say that, “gender has a social component as well”. One word can quickly reorganise the entire thought. It can also save you some embarrassment.
“I’ve only understood it up to this point.”
Writing does not and will not make you an expert on an issue. It will, however, certainly reorganise knowledge structures in the brain and help you understand complex ideas. Writing will become instrumental in becoming a confident speaker and developing an overall integrated personality. Your goals will appear distinctly and the path to them would be illuminated.