A Mason's Work

Gaining perspectives is a great way to understand maybe some of the limitations in your thought process or some of the things that you might benefit from in terms of being able to see around problems or challenges.

In this episode and the next several we're going to talk about using the seven liberal arts and sciences as a foundation or as an opportunity to get around some of those different perspectives.

So we'll start with grammar.

Grammar is one of those things that a lot of folks think about strictly speaking in the context of their sort of mother tongue and their language.

And it is a very important mechanic in how we communicate and also how we think.

And I talked about this another episode about the value of lexicon and adding to your vocabulary.

In the context of grammar though what we're really talking about is the way language is formed.

The way your word choice and the way your how you're phrasing and putting words together that it makes sense.

This is a little bit different than rhetoric which is much more your ability to exchange ideas with others and present them in a meaningful and compelling way.

Grammar is really much more structural in its content.

And as you're developing your grammar perspective when you're looking and evaluating your decision making processes and your communication processes with others.

Sit back for a moment and think about and evaluate the syntactical matter in which you're communicating.

Is this the best way to say the thing you're trying to say?

Not from an emotional content perspective but from a logical content perspective.

The structure of language itself oftentimes dictates a lot more of what you're saying than you think.

So for example if this is very easy in terms of thinking of crayons, the colors of crayons.

If you only have eight colors of crayons with which to kind of reflect the world you're going to be limited in your ability to express that reflection.

When you look at 128 crayons or whatever they're up to now in terms of what they can produce, you have a much broader range of ways to make that expression.

And grammar and language is the same.

If you don't have the word for a thing it's going to be very difficult to express it.

And if you don't think about how you're expressing yourself when it comes to communicating ideas with others, you're not going to be able to close any of the difficult gaps.

You're going to be disadvantaged right out of the gate.

So you're not going to be able to argue your point, you're not going to be able to assert yourself well.

So the grammar perspective is really functional useful in terms of being able to walk through evaluating that problem that you're facing or that challenge you're facing and going, is it, am I, is the problem that I'm facing a direct result of in fact how I'm even framing the conversation, how I'm framing the problem because I don't have the right language for it.

You'll find that using for example emotionally charged language or incorrect language for the problem you're trying to solve will inherently start the fight before you've even had a chance to get to the second sentence or to state a belief for example.

So so grammar is it's just a vital perspective, believe it or not, in what we're sort of talking about as self development as development externally and internally.

So think about your application of that as you move forward and I think we'll catch you next time.