Happy New Year, everyone. It’s been a while since this site has been updated, but we have plenty coming up for you very soon. In the meantime, I hope that you’ve all been well and that you are looking forward to more content in the upcoming year. If you have any suggestions for content or otherwise that you are interested to hear about even as we pursue more ambitious plans in the days ahead, I hope that you will consider emailing them over to me at victortanws@gmail.com or by Instagram to @victortanws.

It’s going to be a wonderful year for all of you out there, and for those of you who are just discovering this site for the very first time, I hope that you will have a wonderful journey into the beauty of the English language whether through English First Language.net or through the course of your journeys in high school.

To those of you who are teachers and who are reading this as well, thank you for your hard work and the hard work that you will do even as you move into this new academic year. Many people rely on you, and many of you out there continue to serve a wonderful role in bringing light, life, and enjoyment to the journeys of your students and by extension, the world that we live in.

So I hope that you will go with that new sense of renewal and pride in everything it is that you are doing. Thank you for using this site, and I look forward to updating you all very soon. Have a wonderful day ahead, and till we meet!

Lately, I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style”. I think it is an excellent book, and you can pick it up here!

The Sense of Style alks about how we should think about language through understanding how other people’s minds work – emphasis on other people’s minds; writing doesn’t come naturally to us as it requires us to imagine what goes on in another person’s mind and having an awareness that there are other minds out there dealing with what we create, and therefore Pinker recommends that tailoring our approach to create writing that creates clarity, images, and creativity as we understand how others think, feel, and process the world – to clearly imagine what’s going on inside people’s heads, to draft, redraft, iterate, and get better.

One thing I think is good for people to understand, but that unfortunately not everyone thinks about, is that when we use language, we are speaking to other people. You are never really just writing into the void; instead, you are always constantly writing to someone else who is going to try to understand what you’re saying, what you’re thinking, and what you’re talking about.

In other words, you are never actually in isolation. What I mean by that is that that’s just what language is like, even if it seems like grading is cold and impersonal and follows sterile, stale guidelines day after day.

I think it is good to remember that at the end of the day, whenever you say anything or write anything, it will end up being perceived, understood, and received by another human being. You could talk about how language can seem formulaic and everything like that, but I don’t think that has to be something that you converge upon.

It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that the world is a certain way and to be caught up in that – yet common as it is, I feel that it is so unfortunate to have as an operative point of view.

What I find more captivating and interesting to hold as a default perspective is the realization that at the end of the day, every single person who is out there, every single view, every single click, every single eyeball that gazes upon what I am creating is looking at something that I chose to express out there and into the world.

I may not see that person; I may not think about them very deeply or otherwise, but it does not matter because it is true. Perhaps hundreds or thousands of people are thinking about what I am saying or thinking at any given moment.

As an English teacher and as a teacher of language, I think that that is an operative principle that we all have to sort of think about or remember. It’s something good to consider whenever we are thinking about how we want to craft our language and ask ourselves,

“How is someone experiencing what I’m saying? What are they thinking about as they read my words? What kinds of things do these arrangements accomplish that another arrangement does not accomplish? And what is the effect of what I said upon upon the people who are looking at this?”

I think that asking questions like these is a good step towards being able to see what goes on in the depths of other people. In that way, consider how we want to direct our speech out to the world beyond the confines of the exam papers and into the realisation that we are constantly influencing each other, we are constantly influencing the world, and we can do much better than we think, and influence far more than we know.

Hello, everyone!

Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!

On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew. 

Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did. 

This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!

Pick it up here!

Link: https://victortanws.gumroad.com/l/september16th 

Also, here’s a sample that you can have a look at to preview the contents!

This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end. 

I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia. 

I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma. 

I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories. 

Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!

Yours, 

V.

Friends, English is not the point. 

Yes, that’s right, you just read that, you heard it sub-vocalized in your head, and now it is there repeatedly being affirmed to you:

I am telling you that language is not the point. 

People often think it’s the point; they think that somehow all of these words that we see on the screen and that you will write in your exam papers are at the end of it the reason that we are here. 

It is with that logic that they will conceive so many different forms of what excellent writing, excellent sentences, and incredible essays are, believing that this excellent writing literally just means fine-tuning, optimizing, and improving the sentences to be more than what they can be – to hope for the very best. 

But that is the wrong target really – for the target is actually something very different. 

Think about it. 

Why do we even write? 

For many of you, it’s to do well in an exam. 

For some of you (if I am lucky), it is for the added pleasure of self-expression. 

In all cases, whether we like it or not, it is to be read and to be understood by another human being. 

Whatever the situation and whatever the context, we are all grasping to create things that others will understand, feel, and see ideally in the same way that we see —  to raise up questions in the ways that we would raise to cause others to think in the way that we might think; in a very real way, writing is just one of many methods of delivery that we can use to put in a message or reshape other people’s minds – both of which are happening even as you read this piece. 

But this is not intuitive to a lot of people. It is far more common that people would think that you would accomplish good writing by putting together the most complicated, verbose, and flowery words that you can, hoping and praying to yourself that somehow something incredible will come out. 

But really, in my mind, that is a little bit like putting lipstick on a farm animal. 

It doesn’t transform the farm animal into Marilyn Monroe in her prime. 

No, you just get a farm animal covered in lipstick. 

We cannot create a Marilyn Monroe with words, but certainly we can create the image though.

Lips ruby red, velvet sky; purple eyeshadow, fourth of July. A billowing white dress lifts up by the summer breeze. A subtle wink, a smile – the iconic mole brushing just past vision as the world turns sepia, her short hair from golden turns into fadations of white; the aged grace of eternity dances in the spotlights, dancing along to your invitation among the hundreds; your hand, her hand, a bond with destiny – and here it is: the memory of what was like to be forever young. 

Go ahead and put that into ChatGPT or any AI image generator. It’ll be fun to see what you get. Share it in the comments! 

What was the point of that? 

The point of that was to show that it’s not about using fancy words – Although, sure. Perhaps I could have used slightly more fancy words compared to what I initially had – But whatever the types of words I used, the point of what I was doing would remain and so would the architecture; it was to create an image in your head from which you could not escape, to shape your reality in a specific way such that you could not help but construct the image that I wanted you to construct because you had read that particular sequence of words.

That is just one example of how language can be a means to an end. It is so in an infinitude of other situations as well, when I want to be delivered. Is to persuade you of something. 

To make you believe in something.

 To convince you to buy any number of things. (Including the books and guides on this site as well as a premium membership!). 

…And to ultimately deliver any number of desired outcomes and A-star included, when you follow the rules, understand the game, and can create something meaningful – Not with language as the end goal, but as a by-product of the meaningful project that you aspire to achieve and design through the orchestration of your words. 

As we come to the end of this post, I am conscious that even these words are but a means to an end – and in my mind, I hope that whatever the ultimate end might be, that at least a part of it was that it helped you to get a little further than you were in your appreciation for language and what it can give.