Blogging and Writing
After having been a blogger for a few years now, I have realized a few things. One of those is that my ability to write has much improved. Okay, I will admit that I am college graduate but sometimes the spew of things I allow to make to a page are embarrassing. Many errors have occurred in this blog (and others) but in general, I write with fewer errors now on first passes and catch those that are made a bit more often these days.
I have over the last few weeks, been running back through the various blogs and running the After the Deadline software on the blogs to help clean up a few issues. I can say without a doubt the worse offenders were those when I first starting blogging. There is a general trend toward fewer mistakes as time moves forward. Some of that I think is just from getting back into the practice of writing a thought stream of this kind of nature on a more consistent basis. Of course I also think some of it is just having refreshed those rules from so long ago that are so easily forgotten if not used on a regular basis.
I do think one has to consider though, that I rarely do any sort of formal writing process when I am posting a blog. I usually have a topic in mind (and I keep notes on several topics that have come into my head ready to go with when the mood strikes me). It is very rare that I make more than a note of what direction my thought was running with the topic. Very rarely I will make a list of 3-5 bullet points that I want to cover in the blog. For the part though, I start with a topic and just go with a stream of writing as the thoughts occur to me.
That being said, I do tend to be less prone to errors when I am focused on writing. I suppose that is a ‘no-duh’ kind of statement to make, but let me see if I can explain it a bit better. Often time I will focus and start a blog, but work a slow stream of data generation. Maybe that allows for other thoughts to slip into that stream and hence to lead to errors. However, when I get into that zone and just type what is coming to my head almost as fast as they show up, I can really put the words on the page quickly. And when I do that, I am always thinking at the end, I am going to have to proof-read this in a major way and do a lot a of cleanup. Interestingly enough though, most often those quick streams that result in an entire blog in fifteen-twenty minutes are often the ones without any errors or in general very few errors to be found.
I am probably not making this very clear, but it would seem the opposite should be true. When one is spending a bit more time working on getting the thoughts arranged and put on the page, it would seem to logically follow that would be the time when the less errors tend to occur. But that is just the opposite of what I typically seem to have occur.
One last thought about all the grammar and such. I really do know the difference between then and than. However, you would not know it by reading my posts in most cases. It has finally occurred to me why I have such issue with that I almost always use then, despite that fact that in most of my writing the correct form is than. This epiphany has pleased me, having just come to me this morning. Just as I use to program a lot in Advanced Basic, which used basica as the command line to launch the compiler and the linker, so to do almost all programming languages have the if-then-else structure in some format or another. Very similar to my almost infamous inability to type the word basic without it coming out basica, so to is my almost hard-wired typing expression to resolve to then instead of than.
For the record, I am aware of the boring nature of this post for most. However, it is an important tidbit of information. Besides, I am posting this on a beautiful middle day of a long weekend with perfect weather for outside activities, so how likely is this to be read by very many anyway?
** – Image from Russel Galvin, Copri
