Writing in English
When I was in France, I loved to write. My personal journal is over 300 pages long, and looking back at its earliest entries, I can see how much I've improved.
When you write a lot, you develop a style — a personal prose. After a few years of it, I could almost recognize my own writing if I stumbled on a past essay at random.
I love writing. There are certain rhetorical devices I overuse more than others — anaphora in particular.
A device perfect for driving a point home. A device just as perfect for building a surge of intensity in the reader. A device finally perfect for drawing out every shade of nuance, for digging into an idea and unfolding it until every corner is revealed.
Writing is giving your thoughts the chance to influence others. It's shaping a sentence with precision to evoke a concept and, at the same time, an emotion. You could write something perfectly clear about an idea, but with no feeling coming through. And in my view, that kind of work is far less memorable.
When I arrived in the United States four years ago, I threw myself into tech. Having learned English since the age of 11 — to code — I already felt in my element. But it was, and still is, a very technical English. Not an English that sounds good. It takes a while, once you've passed the stage of "I'm fluent enough that people sometimes mistake me for American," to realize that true mastery of a language takes infinitely longer.
To express yourself well, with all the necessary prosody, seems to require an enormous amount of work. Many people I admire write fascinating blogs, and I think to myself "I could absolutely write the same thing." And yet… it's more work than it seems. Especially since French prose tends to be longer, more philosophical than English prose — but also less immediately clear.
It's a prose that lives up to what other nationalities might think of the French: beautiful but pompous, sometimes arrogant. And like the chicken-or-the-egg question, you could wonder whether it's our language that shapes our culture, or the other way around, pushing us to act the way we do.
After four years here, I've also noticed a kind of split between my French personality and my English one. It's subtle, but it's there. A different way of presenting things. A tendency to want to say more, where less would be faster. It bleeds into the way I think — to the point where I sometimes wonder if I should think more in French than in English to approach certain subjects.
Beyond the scientific curiosity this raises in me, it's recently pushed me to want to write more in English. Because these two personalities should converge, and the fluency of mind I have in French should exist at the same level in English. It's an extra challenge on the path to greatness for an immigrant. One more thing to take on — especially at a time when you can't afford to sound like an AI. And above all, a pleasure to rediscover in a language I now use more than my mother tongue.
PS: Because I wanted to put my French writing to the test on this English-language blog, this post was written in collaboration with Claude to faithfully render my prose in another language.