The second law of thermodynamics states that: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.” Language to me is like entropy to the universe, which keeps me with heat, with work and from cooling down.

Language splits in different ways like rivers, yet it can also be mixed together like sands. As a multi-lingual young woman with feminine sensibilities, I love writing proses and poems on family, boys and girls and the beauty of nature. On the other hand, to achieve a proper depth as an engineer, my lab reports reflect a logical and rational side of me with facts, statistics and proofs. In the forms of writing, language has gifted me with delicate feelings, soldered me with intellectual insights and shaped me to my “maximum”.

Written words spread out heat and feelings across different backgrounds. When I took college writing, I wrote a story of how my mother’s pregnancy under the one child policy and the arbitrary nature of social standards had shaped me and formed my character. I used to worry about my word choice was not as good as that of a native speaker, but, when I looked back all the details in that story, put them into words and infused with emotions, my feelings in Chinese and English were merged together.

My essay was nominated for the Emerging Voice Event. On the stage, I looked at people, and people looked back at me. In their eyes, I saw the reflection of myself and started reading. An old lady wiped away tear quietly. Girls clenched their lips. My teacher sitting in the back, nodded at me. My trembling non-native accent was echoed in the hall, but I knew that they were listening and they felt what I had felt. Looking into my story, at one second, people might see theirs as well. They applauded, left their seats and then they came to me, held me and said thank you. Even if we came from different countries and were of different races and colors, at that moment, we were connected by the power of written words.

Writing makes deep and dry theories into lively scientific essays. Working on a convoluted report is like portraying a landscape with a complex terrain. It could be dry and difficult. However, with lucid and fluent words, the beauty of sciences could also be vividly depicted. I used to spend more than 6 hours every week in writing lab reports for my electrical circuit lab. Stating the overview, making assumption, listing the procedure and justifying the experimental result in a persuasive way is a journey to have a better understanding of the theory behind.

In one of my introductions to circuit class, I wrote a report on transistor and its properties. The data collected in the experiment showed a noticeable overshoot and a bandwidth features which involved Maxwell’s equations and should be taught in an upper level class. Accompanied with colorful Bode plots, reasonable data analysis on the impedance features, delicate “brush strokes” of equations and explanations, rich patterns of details and facts, my lab report is not a boring technical user guide, but a fascinated argumentative essay. Writing brings a fresh breeze puffed across the field of STEM.

My relationship with language is the bond between Chinese and English and the bridge between engineering and arts. The law of the universe says that the world will never fade away with increased entropy.

Writing increases the entropy in my universe.

It diverges and collides within cultures, disciplines and languages, but generates heat that drives me to a state we called “perfect internal disorder” in engineering, a “maximum” in which I am becoming a better person.