Writing

Today, I feel like writing. It's not every day, but occasionally I get the itch to. And since I couldn't come up with a better topic, I'm writing about writing.

The first "R"

There's an old joke that you go to school to learn your three R's: readin, writin, and rithmetic.

My eldest is learning to read. It's a pre-requisite of writing, so I thought I'd talk about something interesting that he has brought to my attention.

Words are hard

I originally thought of the difficulty of words as being a function of their length. "Copacetic" is both harder to spell and read than "dog". But "overabundance", despite being longer than both, is easier to read. I have since modified my definition of what makes a word hard to read. There's a bunch of factors that weigh in, and length is actually one of the less impactful.

Words are hard to read if they use letters in ways other than the standard for that letter, or digraphs with alternate pronunciations. G is supposed to make a guttural sound, like you might make if you were punched in the stomach. But in "rough", the "gh" digraph sounds like "f". C is taught using "cat" and "car" and "crayon", but not using "ceiling", "change", or "cider".

Words are hard to read if they contain silent letters. The hardest part of learning French (which I did in high school and college) is to have your brain fill in the back half of the words, since you rarely pronounce a whole word. "Maintenant" (today) sounds like man-ten-awnh. "Juillet" (July) sounds like jew-ee-yuh. English is rife with similar examples, like "right" and "height", "rough" and "tough", "ghost", "knife", and "bomb".

Words are hard to read if their vowels don't make the usual sounds. It's easy to learn that vowels say their names sometimes and ah, eh, ih, oh, uh other times. It's less easy to learn oo and ou and au and oi. It's darned near impossible to learn (without being told) how to correctly pronounce words that use the vowels in non-standard ways. How do you learn "queue" without being told? "Mosquito"? "Epitome"?

And finally, words are hard to read if the word is shortened colloquially. Temperature, for example, is typically pronounced tem-per-shure.

The second "R"

My wife (who's a proper author, and writing her first book) often agonizes over transitions. One of my favorite things about writing in this format is I get to include my own section headings which act as nice transitions for you, the reader, so you know we're on a new topic.

Being good at things

On that note, I've noticed that how good you are at something seems to have sort of a bellcurve relationship to how much you enjoy doing it. If you're horribly bad at something, you typically won't enjoy it as much. If you're the best in the world at something, then not only can you not properly share that joy with someone who isn't as good, you often got as good as you are by doing so much practice that it sucked all the fun out. Especially if you're a professional (read: getting paid for it), doing something well can be a downer.

It's the in between place where the joy happens. When you're in between awful and amazing, you have enough room to grow that you can see your progress. You have the ability to find someone better than you who can help you meaningfully improve. And if something stops holding your interest, you don't have this nagging doubt that you're going to lose your number 1 spot if you don't continue pursuing it.

Poetry

I'm in the second category with writing. I've done a fair bit between grade school and college, and a little bit since then. I write code every day, but code is not the same as prose. Poetry is a bit better analogue. My wife sent me a line for her book today, and I wrote a little 4 line poem based on it. It was slightly inappropriate, wildly out of context... and yet we both got to have a genuine laugh over it. Poetry is harder than prose, because it forces you to think about things like meter and end-rhyme. But it's fun to pursue because the results are often fun to read. Just ask Jack Prelutsky or /u/poem_for_your_sprog.

Summary

This was one of my more rambly posts. If you've made it this far, thanks for sticking around. I'd encourage you to experience everyday things like reading with a child's sense of wonder. I'd further encourage you to write something. It can be good for the soul, like ice cream.