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Improve Your Grammar
A destructive read for constructive purposes

Here is a simple exercise you can use to dramatically improve your grammar skills.

A bit of theory

When speaking or writing, we use our grammar skills to compose understandable sentences and express them correctly either in sounds or on paper. How do we do that? Well, there are the rules we learned at school, right? Not exactly.

The language skill is an interesting example, because when we speak or write we do it automatically. Our memetic machinery takes care of that in most cases, leaving us free for more important things. On another hand, what we learn at school is not so memetic, as it is a cognitive approach with fixed deterministic rules. These two systems of information processing are inherently different; you can use them to complement each other, but you can rarely use them instead of each other. Memetic processing is too imprecise, cognitive is too slow. Imagine a world where everybody applied all the grammar rules before ever whispering a word… That would be a really quiet world.

In a nutshell, a memetic language model is used to speak or write, the cognitive one is used to verify what we (or somebody else) spoke or wrote. By all means, formal grammar rules are important, especially if you are an editor, but in the normal life you want to produce good language, not be a thorn in a conversation correcting others, right? What it means is that you need to beef up your memetic language processing capabilities, not the cognitive ones. And the classic ways are all cognitive (“If the subject, object blah-blah-blah, then put a comma, otherwise if blah-blah semicolon, and…”)

So, the traditional way to learn grammar is a cognitive one, that is supposed to slowly sip into your brain and produce live memes that may be used for language generation. The way of absorbing cognitive knowledge is, as of no surprise, memetic, hence imprecise and prone to errors. Add to the equation the fact that the very cognitive quality of grammar rules is very poor in the first place. They may look great to a language professor, but for, say, a mathematician they look like a load of vague contradictory statements telling more about those who created them than about the subject of the matter. This becomes immediately evident when you try to apply grammar rules from your school textbook to the third kind of information processing that we learned recently – the computational one. If you’ve ever used text processing software with grammar checks, you know that it sucks. Computers are nitpickers. Once you try to express grammar rules in the precise language of computers, all the deficiencies of grammar rules become evident.

So, going from imprecise cognitive rules through an imprecise way of absorbing and molding them into memes does not look like the shortest way to achieve the goal, does it?

It truly does not. There should be a way to build your memetic processing directly, after all that’s how children get their basic language skills in the first place. This is what the method described below does.

How do you acquire memetic processing? You pass a lot of relevant information through your mind, and it figures it out on its own. That’s how children learn to speak – by listening to the parents. That’s how children learn to walk – by passing muscular signals and aligning them with information on our falls and successes, while continuing to try. The amount of information you can absorb this way is astonishing. And reading a lot is a recognized way to beef up your language skills. The only problem is that children spend several years learning to speak; you want it faster.

Actually, I already explained the main idea of the technique – reading the correct text and leaving it up to your brain to figure out the rules on autopilot. The missing key is how to make it faster. This is where memetics come to the rescue. While they can explain why known techniques of reading help improve your language skills, they are also capable of suggesting the way to improve this method to make it faster and way more efficient.

There are two key changes that allow that.

The first one is about engaging a larger neural network. When you learn grammar in a cognitive way, only your human mind is engaged in the process. Engaging all three of your minds in the process guarantees higher processing power of a much larger neural network of more than a hundred billion neurons. How do you do that? By engaging other parts of your brains responsible for emotions, vision, motor functions…

The second improvement is achieved by highlighting essential information and hence separating it from an overall stream of incoming signals. When you simply read, the grammar rules are merely a background to your human mind, and your other minds don’t pay much attention to it either. What they do is still enough for you to learn, but it’s done on a backburner, not at full load. What’s worse, certain parts of your lowers brains act as filters taking out this information from what comes to you. By adding attention to the specific kind of the information that you are looking for, you are creating a separate stream of signals that are purposefully processed by your mind for learning. In this case, the information is not filtered and it is getting into your minds as something worth your attention.

On this note, let’s finish the theoretical part and get to the practical.

The exercise

Now it’s time to explain the title. “Destructive read” – what does it means?

As I already explained, the essence of the exercise is not new – you just read a book. The difference is that after you do that, the book will become pretty much unusable, hence the term “destructive read”.

If you feel that it’s a shame to waste a completely perfect new book on that – like I do – go to a used books store like “Half Price Books” and pick a paperback that is in a still readable condition, but is otherwise a perfect candidate for the trash can. Not by the content, however. This is very important, the content of the book should be able to raise your emotions, involve you; simply put, the book must be interesting to you. This is critical to involve other parts of your brain, primarily lower brains responsible for your emotions.

Now, decide what is it exactly that you want to improve on. Is it commas? Sentence structure? Use of articles? Verb tenses? Don’t pick up several areas at once; decide on just one thing. That will immensely help the efficiency of the exercise by concentrating on a single area with a single set of rules to derive instead of dispersing it over everything. Don’t worry, you will still reap benefits in other areas the same way as you would by just reading the book the usual way.

Now that you have decided, say, on comma use, start the exercise. Get a pen, I’d recommend a bright felt-tip Paper-Mate “Flair” pen, because it requires very little pressure and works well even if you lie with the book in bed. Now, start to read the book as you would normally, but underline the object of your interest in the book with the pen. Say, underline all commas and the places where you would place a comma, even if you don’t see one. Continue to read the book and keep with the story, this is important to engage your lower brains. Underlining the problem areas also helps to engage the visual and motor areas of your brain. By doing so, you also prevent your brain stem from filtering this information out – a very real danger to this information otherwise.

Now, do this exercise for at least 10-15 minutes daily. You can do it before going to sleep. In fact, you can do it in bed. If you engage in the story, it will also make your bedtime reading. In a couple of weeks you will notice the improvements. It’s not like you will be able to explain (see the part about subjects, objects and blah-blah-blah), you will start to feel when you need to place a comma, what form a verb should be in, or the answer to whatever difficulty you had before. Continue through several books and you will never need to check the grammar textbook again.

In fact, this exercise is so efficient that trying to get grammar from a textbook may actually make your grammar worse. You will be like a centipede that never thinks about which pair of legs should be moved first, and who is asked how it does so. The skill will come to you naturally, it will be as simple as breathing or walking. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Keys to the exercise

Why the keys are important:

Now, good luck! Please, let me know how you do! You can get in touch with me here.

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