Communication Is Talking To People In Ways They Understand

I once had a Ph.D. stu­dent; a female friend told me she liked my writ­ing if only I would stop cussing… My dear friend, a male pub­lic ser­vant, also told me that some of his con­tem­po­raries would read my work on the mer­its, but the cussing offends them.
What do both my friends have in com­mon? They both reside in Jamaica.
Okay, so I will be the first to admit that real writ­ers do not use cuss words; of course not. But I nev­er claimed to be a real writer, and I have always seen myself as an incon­se­quen­tial loud­mouth with an opin­ion and a low tol­er­ance for bullshit…
Here is the thing, get­ting one’s views out to peo­ple does not require a Ph. D it does­n’t even require a col­lege degree as long as the per­son com­mu­ni­cates their views in ways that oth­ers can appre­ci­ate. Social media is a true tes­ta­ment to that fact.

I always mar­veled at these con­tra­dic­tions regard­ing us Jamaicans who insist on prop­er ver­biage and parts of speech on the one hand. At the same time, we con­tin­ue to push a dialect, ‘patios’ and insist that oth­ers adopt it as a true lan­guage even though we have no idea how to write it in a con­sis­tent way that every­one can agree on.
Me, I don’t give a rat’s ass about prop­er writ­ing, prop­er gram­mar, or prop­er anything.
I had nev­er set foot on a col­lege cam­pus except when I took my kids there to reg­is­ter them for class­es. I am old school, home edu­cat­ed, and I do not need a piece of paper to val­i­date me.
Glad I got that off my chest; google algo­rithms have already val­i­dat­ed this poor boy from North East Siant Catherine who nev­er went to col­lege, a poor boy who brought him­self up on his own.…no, not by his boot­straps. I had no boots.
This lit­tle blog is now read around the world.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.