a space to fail | Haeji Jung

I am starting to write this post with a little hope that no one sees it.

This blog is aimed at improving my English writing skills. I’ve just started my PhD at UBC, and I feel like I need to practice my language A LOT. Not only writing, but reading, listening, and speaking as well. For writing, I decided to write blog posts regularly, without ChatGPT’s help at all, which means my grammar and expressions will be awful.

As a student coming from non-English speaking country, ChatGPT has been my great mentor for English writing. Since ChatGPT has become very popular, I’ve been receiving feedback from it regarding grammar and word choices. It was super convenient, because ChatGPT usually captures my intention quite well, even from a rough draft with a bunch of broken English. However, at some point, I started to feel like I want to stop relying on ChatGPT to finalize my writing. I did not enjoy the feeling of not being able to complete my task without an AI. Now that I’m pursuing my PhD, which is essentially a process of becoming an expert in my field, with a descent amount of writing being part of my job, I definitely want to become an independent, mature writer.

So, the first and foremost goal of this blog will be to familiarize with writing a draft without LLM, and get closer to a good academic writer.

I’ll start by simply writing down my experiences and thoughts, just like writing a diary, which will usually be about my grad life. Although my final goal is to become a better writer in academic writing, blog posts will be very casual. Because, again, the goal of this post is getting me familiar to writing by myself. I believe I first need to have an acceptable level of quality in casual writing to start with.

To sum up,

All text in all posts will not be revised by any LLM! It will be purely written by me, probably with a lot of broken English, weird combinations of words, wordy and ungrammatical sentences.
I will instead let myself search for words with Google or Thesaurus.
The posts will be in a very casual manner. I think it will not be TOO MUCH casual as in social media, but will just try to be comfortable. Comfortable but clean, and sometimes logical and reasonable writing is what I aim to practice.
I will generally try to spend minimal time to rephrase or revise the writing, as this is for practice and I don’t want to spend way too much time on this. At the same time, I also want to practice speeding up with my writing. I MIGHT occasionally spend time if I feel like it 🙃

Please bear with me and be nice if anyone reading the posts finds any of them so awful. It already feels naked to post in this manner, but I’m willing to fail without shame in this space! Please please feel free to rephrase or point out grammar mistakes or anything, in a nice / clean / native-like way. I’m trying to improve!!

Lastly, yes, I am not very confident with my English, and I AM nervous to have someone read my posts and hope that no one sees it on one hand, but I also have another little hope of connecting with other people, including grad students like myself, researchers from my field or outside, or maybe writing experts. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you feel like it!