The entire premise of this site is that it offers you a set of solutions, strategies, and suggestions on how you should excel in the art of rhetoric, the English language, and across both reading and writing.
Here, we’ve talked a lot about language analysis (and we may talk more), which is crucial to this exam, and that I teach you about as a guide whom you may not have met.
It is something that I am passionate about, and that I speak about quite a fair bit through thoughts and chicken scratchings that miraculously, thousands of you have considered as you’ve looked at my thoughts along the way.
Thank you very much for that, and for your overwhelming support.
Today though, I’d like to talk about something a little different.
However good a teacher is, they cannot be there 24-7.
Probably, reading this post is only going to take out 5 minutes out of your day of 24 hours – 0.3472% of your day – It is but a drop in the ocean of the time that you may spend in order to learn and to direct your energy.
It would require a miracle of monumental proportions, or an extreme density of information for me to send over words on my part that would directly empower you.
Clearly, there is no mention in this set of sentences that I am doing so – No specific mentions of how to write a summary, a directed writing piece, or any of the questions that you will be dealing with.
In part though, this is intentional, because every single one of those questions requires you to go beyond the superficialities of format and flow:
Your language is not just about memory, not just about copying what you’ve heard about. It is more than just reading the excellent sample essays that you will find in the Premium Memberships section. (To be updated soon!)
Instead, it is about the conscious decisions that you choose to make when you write, the pattern of inferences and the logical chain of reasoning that you participate in when you read.
The way certain words carry out a meaning to you. The associations that you make, and how you logically think through them. The mental models that come to mind when you start thinking about what you should say in response to any question, and the way that you follow through with that decision, as different parts of your pre-existing training come to the fore, as a pattern of decisions manifests itself upon the page.
Put simply, language is not about just using a particular strategy at a particular time. No, it is the entire architecture of how you think, and that cannot be conveyed in a mere 0.03% of a day.
This is how we come to the question of motivation. Because as I told you, I cannot be your eternal guru. It is simply impossible.
Somehow or another, you will have to embody a realization that a part of you must be self-directed. That it must choose to learn, and consciously make an effort, rather than just receive along the way – No strategy and no technique will help you unless you have that part of you that will push you onwards to learn more, to discover more, and to appreciate fully the nuances of language that a simple blog post like this or even any number of reference books cannot fully convey even as you appreciate their value.
If you find this little observation interesting, then that is good.
Maybe it will stimulate you to learn a little more than you would have in an alternate universe, because it unlocks the little part of you that says that you will push onward and continue the learning journey in a space beyond what you are reading at the moment, or what you are listening to.
In fact, I can imagine multiple possible scenarios taking place here as the universe splits open multiple pathways that could result.
In one pathway, you read this and you go away thinking that was an interesting blog post and nothing else happens. You don’t really question your life or anything that you’ve done so far and you treat this merely as an interesting Google search result.
Or perhaps make a mental note that this is something to share with your children and this is something to share with your children.
In another pathway of the millions possible, we can imagine that maybe you will read a book, think consciously for ten minutes in the course of a thought that you would not have had if you had chosen to just let it be.
But I would not unduly generalise things, because the reality is likely something in-between. Like thousands of other people, you probably found this particular blog post by an accident. You clicked upon a link, you were SEO’d, you went to the homepage, and then you saw me. And for whatever reason, you decided to continue reading. Maybe even get persuaded. Slowly, subtly, but suddenly, uncontrollably.
Even if you disagree, I would simply like to encourage you this.
If you saw some value in what you are seeing now and what you have seen on this website, consider sharing it with many more people out there, whether parents or fellow students: A good thing should not be kept to yourself after all, and things like these don’t spread just because of technology, but rather because you as a human choose to share it – because of what we intentionally choose to spread, support, and make successful.
Ours could very well be a generation that is motivated only by the grades, the exam scores, the potential employment opportunities, or the money that could come about. But there is something greater, I am sure, than what we are looking at and I am confident that you have a role in creating a part of that universe. Share your motivation today, and do your part to make this world the better place that you aspire for it to be.
Think of sharing this article as sharing your motivation, and think of sharing your motivation as sharing your success – A path that is chaotic, and that will lead to a better society in ways that you may not understand at the moment.
