#i have a collection of elizabethan non-shakespeare plays and it's just. it's not there. that spark. that life. that deep understanding

[99liners]

Hello Jamie! I hope you're doing good?

Fellow indian here👋.I wanted to ask you how is your eng so good?I really want to know.If you read by any chance , plz drop some recommendations.I really want to be a better eng speaker.Have a good day;)

henlo! i am okay bub, and you?

omg, you think my English is good? i constantly feel like i am lacking in diction and that it can be better 😅 but thank you so much! it's a great compliment and i humbly accept it.

i do read, yes.

i used to read extensively, especially when i was in middle school but life has gotten busier ever since.

this is going to sound racist, but if you want to better your English, stop reading from Indian authors; Chetan Bhagat and the like (i am not basing this off blind hatred but i have actually read, at least, four books of Chetan Bhagat before coming to the conclusion. so, i am speaking from experience). if it's someone like Salman Rushdie, then go for it.

most importantly, don't make it a task.

first, choose the genre that interests you the most. it can be anything from romance, horror, detective stories, non-fiction, auto/biographies, and so on. then start with the most popular one in the genre. search about related works in the same genre and find the books that appeal to you. don't feel like you have to be all aesthetic and read underrated books, go for the overrated ones first. the over hyped, best selling ones. again, do not treat it as a task, like paying too much attention on the words or the flow but just read it as you would any book. read it naturally and you will realize that you have started to notice the linguistic style of the author, the diction, the flow of the words, automatically. that is very necessary. that is how you grow as a reader when you start noticing the small things.

i come from a family full of doctors, and my father has these huge ass encyclopaedias and as a kid, i just used to flip through those pages just to see the images and touch the shiny pages 😂 but with time, i started reading what was written underneath but still it would not make sense to me (cause it's a science encyclopaedia and i was 8-9 years old) but i would read it to know more. i remember i did not understand the concept of space being limitless, it absolutely baffled me. and as i learned more, now i am obsessed with space.

then in middle school, abba got me the full collection of sherlock holmes and i kid you not, i ate that book up. i was so engrossed in detective stories that i ended up reading all those short stories and novels more than twice. and then i found similar books and expanded my genre further.

i think another advantage i had was my English tutor. although, i am from a very small town but i had an amazing tutor who had passion about his subject. i think i still have a lot of dialogues from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (in the original Elizabethan text) jotted down to memory.

read: language wise, as far as i have read, Salman Rushdie is so good, his depictions are pure art. i have never been to kashmir, but through his writings, i could visualise it. same goes for Haruki Murakami. his depictions of Japan from the 80's is breath taking. it is like visualising a black and white art movie. read classics like: art of war, pride and prejudice, the great gatsby, 1984, metamorphosis, frankenstein, all the plays of Shakespeare, especially, Julius Caesar, Paulo Coelho’s works, and my absolute favourite, to kill a mockingbird.

write: to master any language, you must develop a habit of writing in that language, as well. if you are already in school, then you would be writing a lot of essays for your coursework but if you have graduated school, that’s alright too. start small: next when you text your friends on WhatsApp / FaceBook Messenger / Instagram Direct, etc, type in English instead of your mother tongue. most importantly, absolutely avoid using text message shortcuts like “u” “ur” "plz", they will be the bane of your improvement.

grammar: additionally, if you want to improve your grammar, consider buying Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis. it barely costs like 150 bucks and is a must if you want to improve your skills.

hope this long ass answer holds even an ounce of useful advice that you can utilise. let me know if you have any further questions!

[britneyshakespeare]

🔥🔥🔥 !!

hmmm. i’ll see what i can think of. i’ll do 3 but i’ll try to keep em short. these are just off the top of my head.

idk who noah smith is, apparently some journalist from bloomberg, but i always see him on my twitter tl, either people agreeing w him or dunking on him, i don’t care, i DON’T care, but he’s had several different icons on twitter and none of them are of him. they’re ALL of william butler yeats. he’s had several different photographs of w. b. yeats as his online representation of himself and just god y’know... i wish i had thought of it. i wish *i* could be moderately talked about on twitter, and always represented by a little picture of william butler yeats. no one ever brings it up that they’re dunking on/agreeing w yeats and i feel it’s a wasted opportunity.

i like picking up used books not just bc they’re cheaper than new books, but also bc they feel like they have some kind of past life to it. i love big fancy new editions, OH, those barnes & noble collections of classics, the leatherbound ones w the gilded pages, I’LL ADMIT, i picked up a few of those (the treasury of irish literature, the treasury of irish fairy and folk tales, and 3 bronte sisters novels, if i’m coming clean), BUT, if they’re just regular degular classics reprints, i’d rather get em used. plus, you find a more interesting selection when you’re looking at people’s old books... i found a paperback copy of 5 compiled thomas middleton plays, in kinda-shoddy-but-still-holding-together condition, printed sometime in the 80s, and it’s the kinda thing that i KNOW i wouldn’t have gotten if i hadn’t just happened to step into savers on THAT day. because where do you find a new copy of thomas middleton nowadays wo having to stoop to ordering online???

speaking of middleton, on the topic of elizabethan playwrights, the idea that shakespeare was anything other than the man, william shakespeare, writing his plays, is really silly, and i don’t blame people who don’t know much about the man or his time period for thinking it has some credence to it, but i just wish it were known more widely how RIDICULOUS it is—it’s not something anyone believed until about the nineteenth century when some people wanted to revise history. it’s the Victorian “Paul Is Dead.” for a non-noble man of the sixteenth century, his life was SURPRISINGLY well documented. there’s no legitimate paper trail or anything that suggests it was anyone’s pen name or a conspiracy. the idea that he was too “uneducated” to have written his plays is ridiculous because the elizabethan middle class had a pretty impressive standard of education, ESPECIALLY in literature and boys regularly put on and wrote plays in their school years. no historian worth a dime has ever thought francis bacon, or whoever else, wrote a single line. he did collaborate w a few other writers on some of his early plays, but that was standard practice a lot of the time. jonson, kyd, marlowe, middleton, et cetera, all did that (in fact, middleton may have written some of all’s well that ends well). also by that same token, shakespeare probably wrote unofficially credited parts of other people’s plays too. but generally, shakespeare wrote shakespeare, and it’s really annoying that the false hot take “what if he DIDN’T????” gets so much airtime around the popular discourse of his work in the year of our lord 2019. what if the moon landing was faked? well, who cares, ‘cause it wasn’t.

that ended up being too long but ya know once i get goin... i keep on goin!

Send me a 🔥 for an unpopular opinion.