My Love for Writing

Growing up, I have always loved writing. It is just one of those things that came naturally to me. I think this is because I had the opportunity to read a lot of fiction while I was young, thanks to my 3 older siblings, who always ensured I had an endless supply of fiction books to read. Reading a lot of novels at such a young age, just helped unconsciously develop my writing skills, and writing just seemed to come naturally after.

I still remember how much I loved writing essays, writing cover letters and statements of purpose for my scholarship applications. My favourite part of my doctoral training was writing up the results of my research in a paper. Heck, I even got a 29/30 in my TOEFL writing exam without much preparation. I still wonder till today why the one remaining mark wasn’t awarded.

My Writing Skill Atrophy

However, I have to say, I have lost it, and my writing ability right now is subpar at best. A lot of things happended that I think contributed to this.

• I grew up, life happened and I stopped reading fiction as I used to growing up.
• While I did do a lot of reading during my studies, including bachelor’s and master’s, most these have been technical math textbooks, which arguablly aren’t the best materials to help improve or even maintain one’s writing flair.
• I did do a fair amount of reading and writing during my doctoral research, but these were mostly scientific papers, and scientific writing. I find scientific papers quite terse, and they’re honestly quite subpar when it comes to developing general writing skill. Of course, they’re helpful for developing “scientific writing” skills.
• Skill atrophy due to learning a new language and culture. I moved to a new country with a different language at 26. Moving to Spain, without speaking a word of spanish, meant I really had to make a conscious effort to suppress my English usage in order to pickup Spanish and get proficient enough to give myself a change of working professionally in Spanish. This led to me using English far less than I would have if I were living in an anglophone country, and this invariably led to some skill atrophy.
• Skill atrophy, due to large language models. LLMs came along right after I finished my doctoral studies, and I just delegated a lot of my drafting and writing tasks to LLMs. And that led to me not exercising my writing, and ultimately skill atrophy.

What I’m Doing About My Writing Skill Atrophy

If there are two things I can take away from this self reflection, I think they are:

• I need to read to write
• If you don’t use a skill, you lose it.

Since, I don’t want to lose my writing skill, I am deciding to get back into reading more diverse materials, including fiction. I will also start writing on this blog, where I hope to share what I’m up to from time to time with posts.

None of the posts this blog will be written by AI, and I am also deciding to consciously scale back on the use of AI for writing. I know that if I continue delegating my writing to AI, my writing skill will eventually atrophy, to the point where I’ll also lose the judgement to discern a good writing from a bad one, thereby loosing the ability to actively monitor what the AI is doing. I don’t want that to happen, given that writing data analysis reports, and presenting findings from research is one of the critical tasks I have to do (and that I love to do) in my chosen career path.

If somehow, you’ve read my ramblings up to this point, I can only say thank you. Hopefully, my subsequent posts will be better planned with more organised and interesting thoughts, so stay tuned.