I Almost Perfected Writing Entire Paragraphs While Listening to Others Talk in Real Time, and This may not be a Good Thing

China and the United States negotiated a temporary truce in their ongoing trade war, slashing the tariffs they had imposed on one another for 90 days and lifting stock markets worldwide in its aftermath. However, analysts from various news outlets, and surely, investment banks, continue to see uncertainties as the two sides left largely unsaid what will happen after those 90 days expire. Will the tariffs go up and send business and markets downhill once again, or will the vaulted idea of "continued negotiation mechanism" established during these talks help dial down the temperature permanently?

As a self-crowned journalist, I have tried to learn to type up short passages like the above in record time. The more I can quickly summarize the factual context, the quicker I can jump into my personal analysis that distinguishes my pieces of writing from those of others. But despite being able to come up with short snippets as such in a matter of minutes, for years, I have been unable to find a further breakthrough. While it is easy to read a bunch of news articles and summarize them at my own pace, undistracted by others, to do so in conversation while under verbal pressure seemed to become more and more difficult.

I have COVID-19 to partly thank for this obstacle. I had spent years sitting in offices and producing required output while others were sitting right next to me and providing near-constant distraction. But the pandemic quickly eroded my skill in concentrating amidst a constant buzz. Left with a job largely requiring the very one-man work of typing up written reports, in the complete silence of a one-room apartment in Chiba, I became enamored with the very idea of "work" being largely done in silence, not disrupted, supervised, or monitored by others beyond an occasional instant message.

While my work is still fully remote, transitioning to an educational consultancy hit me hard when I realized that how I worked did not fit with the new environment. While I was perfectly able to come up with pages full of short paragraphs (like the first paragraph) when left alone in silence, the new job required me to turn into words the content of conversations I have with students. Even if I did not write perfectly legible paragraphs, I had to at least take notes, to track my progress with the student, and for the student to remember what brainstorming accomplished in hours upon hours of talking.

I almost had to learn from scratch. The beginning was brutal as I jot down individual words streaming out of a student's mouth, unable to string them together on the fly. For my own notes, it might work just as well since these words are enough to open memory drawers that contain much unwritten information. But I cannot expect the same from the student who may want to rely on those few words to write up entire essays. To ensure the thoughts are fuller in writing, directly usable as sentences in an essay, I initially had to interrupt the students, ask them to halt speaking for some time, as my writing caught up slowly.

So it is with pride that today I can say that the long learning process has almost come to an end. Today, as the students speak, I am typing out entire paragraphs on the fly, sometimes reciting them simultaneously for the students to keep their concentration and tell me to fix my errors in real time. The notes are no longer distinct words. Bullet point lists that serve as essay outlines grow organically out of brainstorming sessions, while those meetings that require me to read and then provide feedback on revisions for drafts, even at times, have me write suggestions for brand-new sentences that replace large swathes.

This new "skill" of mine has perhaps made me more useful to my current students. They can get my writing directly in meetings without having to wait for more detailed written feedback, as had been the case for students of past years. But in their happiness, I felt my writing becoming more detached. As I became more capable of turning spoken words into written ones, the process became more automated and unthinking. I no longer try to think or feel much about the words I write, just making sure they capture information more precisely.

In the process, my writing has become more impersonal. Whereas I used to handwrite my notes, embellishing them with my distinct handwriting and shorthand symbols, now the clicking sounds of my keyboard seem to generate passages that can be written by any other. It is thanks only to the uniqueness of each student's thoughts that my output can still have something new. Had it not been for their pouring their hearts and minds out in words, my writing would be nothing more than the bland descriptions of the latest Sino-American trade negotiations.