By: Shiva Neupane
It was just few weeks away from now when my article got selected and published in the Age I felt extremely happy about it. I am not being wayward about this seemingly unwarranted linguistic-pride. I do take an utmost pride or if I may say so an intellectual-drive in what it takes to have engraved one’s name in the highly reputed international newspaper.
Honestly speaking, I did not put more effort to get my article published in the Age because to me writing was not important in my early attempts, it was all about reading.
To become a good writer a person has to have a relentless capacity to read voraciously. I have been in Australia for donkey’s years and ever since I had jetted off to down under I had cultivated a habit to read the Australian Newspapers routinely because when I read the newspapers back home I felt they were familiar with my level of English standard. However, surprisingly enough, I went aback when I started to read the local newspapers here. Case in point, an MX city Newspaper was to my mind totally not in line with my English knowledge acquisition.
Prior to reading the Australian newspapers I had published countless articles in English national daily. However, I did not find any clue to understand the write-ups in the local newspapers because of the fact that the people who are natives to English have different approach to construct the sentences and this was the linguistic-fine- line or suffice to say, a challenge to which my mind was buffering so immensely for understanding the very bedrock of English language structural interlaced and intricacies.
The publication of my article in “THE AGE” was to me a kind of my lexical and linguistic-litmus test for embarking upon the mainstream media in the years to come.
Shiva Neupane is the author of “Falang English Dictionary” and “In the Pursuit of Utopian Life in Australia”.
