My memory has been awful lately. I came on here with something specific I wanted to write, and now I can’t remember what it was. Oh well, I guess I’ll just write about what I happened to be thinking about a couple of minutes ago.

I’ve been perusing Facebook throughout the day, and I have seen numerous posts (more so today than other days, it seems) about the conditions of human rights in Iran. I’ve been reading story after story after story about political activists, journalists, a Muslim man who converted to Christianity and became a pastor, etc. One of them is on a hunger strike, in very poor health, recently had a heart attack and was transferred to a hospital, and has now been transferred back to Evin prison even though he should still be in medical care given his condition. The Christian pastor, who is 34 years old and is the father of 2 young boys, was sentenced to death today. None of the stories had a positive ending, and there was not even a glimmer of hope.

I suppose the thought I’m left with, besides wondering how this could possibly even be going on, is whether I will ever be able to make a difference in this situation. On the one hand, I think “Of course not!” On the other, I think of Vaclav Havel, about whom I was writing my senior thesis in high school before I switched schools. He was a random playwright (which is not to say that I don’t love his plays), essentially a nobody, and then he ended up being the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. He was awarded, among other recognitions, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Order of Canada, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award. In 2005, he was voted 4th among a global poll for Prospect magazine’s top 100 intellectuals in the world. At the time of his death on December 18, 2011, he was the Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation. Sure, he grew up in a wealthy, well-known family, and my upbringing couldn’t have been more different than his. Nevertheless, when I look at how he changed the world with his ideas and his refusal to back down when it came to his beliefs, I have some hope. Maybe there is a chance for change. While I would give quite a lot to be a part of it, even if it happens without my involvement whatsoever, I will still be beyond happy.

So, as depressing as it is, I will keep reading these articles about imprisoned Iranians. I can’t ignore this. I won’t let myself.

Where To Draw the Line?

I love languages, and, though I have never taken a linguistics course and very well may never get a chance to, I am fascinated by how they work. There are so many things about languages that I don’t know, and there is an infinite amount more information about them that I simply will never know. I might not ever come across these pieces of information, they might not ever cross my mind, they might be something I wonder about but never remember to look into, etc. Even though I highly doubt I’m going to change my major and study linguistics or decide to minor in the subject or even ever look at it in a more academic and scholarly light rather than simply being driven to learn about them by curiosity, the fact still remains the same: languages amaze me.

Because of the number of people to whom I give ESL lessons or are learning English and chat with me on a much more casual level, I am asked fairly frequently how many languages I know. I’m always somewhat embarrassed to admit that I really only know one: English. While it is true that I studied Ancient Greek for three years and reached a point where I translated a chapter of the Odyssey, have studied Persian on-and-off at two different universities, and took one year of Latin in which I was the top student in my class, I don’t feel comfortable saying that I actually know any of these languages. I’m currently working on becoming better at Persian, but I am so far from fluent that it would be deceitful to claim to know it.

I do, however, know English well. Though I won’t deny that I can be elitist and overly picky about grammar, I pride myself in the fact that I actually know English grammar. My vocabulary is not as strong as I would have considered it a few years ago, but that’s not because I have lost words from my word bank, but because I have been encountering fewer words that I don’t recognize and must learn over the past couple of years. Whereas my vocabulary was above my peers’ when I was young, I would say that I currently have an average vocabulary for someone who is my age and/or at a similar point in their education as I am.

For whatever reason, whether it is because they trust my knowledge of the language or simply because I’m the only native English speaker they know, I get asked to read many application essays for graduate schools, practice essays for the TOEFL or IELTS, and other pieces of writing that have been written in English by non-native speakers. I am more than willing to proofread them for various reasons that don’t particularly matter, but it means that, especially around this time of year, I spend a good amount of my time editing.

Sometimes the work is quick and easy. Take, for example, a blog post on a topic with which I am familiar that was written by someone who has been seriously studying English for years. There is little need for the post to be perfect, it is generally short, I know the vocabulary and understand the idea that the writing is attempting to convey, and there are very few grammatical errors, awkward phrases or sentences, or spelling mistakes to begin with. The documents I read range from a work as simple as that to ones that need serious editing or, on rare occasions, need to be re-written.

In the cases on the extreme end of the difficult side of the scale, I’m often simply lost for how to handle the situation. Purely as an example, let’s take a letter of motivation that was sent to me recently. This letter is being sent to a graduate school in Germany from a student in Azerbaijan. I edited the first third or so of the letter, and then I found myself completely stuck. It’s not that the student’s English is poor; it is actually, in the grand scheme of things, pretty good. In all honesty, the problem is that the entire part of the letter that I have read so far and, from skimming the rest, the whole thing is written in an extremely arrogant tone. I could make all the grammatical changes, comments on wording, and suggestions on sentence structure that I want, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I would not feel comfortable and like I had done the best job I could to help this student if I sent it back to him without mentioning that it has what I consider to be a fatal flaw. For a few days, it sat open on my computer, and every time I saw it, I wondered what I should do. I eventually decided that the only thing I could do that would help him and allow me not to feel guilty was to tell him flat-out what I thought while being as polite as possible. I’ve never applied to graduate school, but I have read enough Statements of Purpose that I feel like I have a good understanding of what makes one successful. In the response I received, the author was grateful for my honesty and asked me to help him fix it to make it more appropriate. While this will take time both on my part and his, I am comfortable with this arrangement.

I often find myself struggling, though, with just how much editing I should do. I make an effort only to correct grammar and spelling, but I allow myself to comment on structure, wording, unnatural phrases, and other things of that nature. I also try very hard not to change anything that would make the piece any less their work. I try not to change sentences significantly, and if I have ever changed the point that a writer was trying to get across, it was unintentional and an error on my part that I feel is an editing failure. Recently, I have found myself making more comments and suggestions, and I wonder if I am helping or not. Maybe if the writer follows all of the thoughts I give him or her on the piece of work, it will sound completely natural, have no grammatical or spelling errors, be well organized, and be, overall, a much better essay than the original. If it is not the author’s work, though, and my editing is somehow getting in the way of his or her thoughts and ideas, that really is beneficial to absolutely nobody.