One week is just gone, and you can’t guess how much I’ve learned.

I’m having my OPW in Marketing team. I’m a writer, I’ve publish 10 books (I know, not very eco-friendly, the next will be an e-book, I swear) but what I really found hard, what I never thought would be so difficult, has been the difficulties I’m having in finding the correct cultural reference points.

I always believe that, more than text, context speaks, and very often, what I wrote has encountered cultural mismatches (sometimes very embarrassing, as I wrote “I can’t stand” instead “I can’t wait” ).

I can’t say that sometimes it isn’t frustrating, sometimes is difficult to explain something without using paradoxes, metaphors, analogies, but it’s a challenge that’s opening my mind. I feel myself in a very cramped street, and, as I teach in my writing courses, the wider you want to talk, the narrower you references have to be: it’s a very different way to write, not very deep but very essential.

And I never have needed to be more essential in my life as now. So this is a gift too.

To communicate with people whose cultural reference points are so different each other, I need to start remembering that an apple is an apple, and, as Mr Freud said, sometimes a cigar too.

So Mr. Sheldon Cooper, please help me: what’s the reference that I can’t miss?

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu