On non-native writing

It is laborious, as it happens, to write in the language most familiar to you - so that to write in a language which seems to be at a considerate distance from you, which you experience as external to you, becomes an even deeper challenge. Exactly for this reason it requires more practice, and so a new blog was born.

“By writing much, one learns to write well,” Robert Southey said once, according to Internet rumours. Since I decided to take this saying by heart, the idea of yet another blog has been wandering in and out of my head. I also considered keeping a diary, and therefore not display my thoughts where the whole world could access them, but figured that putting them online would result in a greater pressure to think carefully about which words to use and how to express myself. The problem is not that I cannot write in English – the aim is for me to learn to write well as well as to not take hours to get a good sentence out. From this it should be clear that, despite its presence on the World Wide Web, this blog is for me. Its genesis is my desire to improve my writing skills. Any reader, however, will be considered a most generous bonus.

The meaning of the chosen title of my blog will be the content of a future post, but it may be appropriate to address its inspiration . As part of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, the University of Essex puts on a module entitled 'Dangerous Ideas: Essays and Manifestos as Social Criticism'. I have had the luck to end up in this module as a notetaker for Student Support and have thus far enjoyed it immensely. The idea of manifestos fascinated me. To present or defend succinctly a way of life, an idea, a proposal for change – this seemed to me to be the perfect topic for my writing exercise.

And that is how we ended up here.