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The frustrating thing about writing -- or any kind of creation, really -- is that it never turns out the way it was in your head. Sometimes this can be a good thing; the inspiration of the moment may hit and change everything in one fell swoop, or a serendipitous happening could send you off in a more productive direction. But often, at least for me, what actually appears behind the blinking cursor is but a pale immitation of the idea that captivated my mind.
Whenever I complained about papers or essays in high school, my dad would say someting along these lines: "The ability to communicate effectively in the most important thing you can learn. If you can write well, if you can make your ideas and your opinions understood by other people, that will help you more than almost anything else." And you know, it's true. So many of the problems in the world are because of miscommunication in one form or another, problems all the way from the personal to the global. God wasn't messing around when he cursed the people at Babel. Understanding each other is difficult enough even in the same language, but add in the language barrier and differences in thinking born of different cultures and BAM! You've got all kinds of wars and conflicts. All because we either couldn't, or didn't want to, understand each other. Ponder that for a bit. And then think about the abysmal state of language education -- both English and foreign -- in the majority of this country. All the science and the math in this world will be of no use to us if we can't talk to and understand each other.
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