As I finish this day binge-listening to undiscovered classical music on Rdio (an example), I'm looking back at those past 6 months of nearly-uninterrupted insightful daily blogging. While that doesn't sound like much feat, considering that on all those micro-blogging sites users post several times a day, the key word here is insightful. Still, even looking back at my first post in January, I still haven't clearly answered the (unasked) question: Why?
True, I made vague references relating to practicing my English writing skills, but considering that my day-to-day work requires me to do most of my communication in English, writing on a blog at the end of the day seems superfluous. (By the way, my mother tongue is French, a language far less forgiving, regardless of the amount of cross-influence English and French had over the last few centuries.)
Back to that important key word "insightful", writing about mundane stuff on Twitter doesn't require much writing skill. Writing about thoughtful things in "long prose", and well, requires far more skill and practice. Doing so under the duress of exhaustion at the end of the day, with a depleted amount of inspiration, also requires more practice. Of course keeping such writing discipline brings additional difficulty.
I'm now getting better at revising myself before posting. Also at finding the correct and best word without falling back into a thesaurus, which would make my writing style impersonal and faked. And also at deleting what's not essential, rather than rambling on (I blame our school system of "Write X words minimum" and our market of short stories padded into thick novels). I still rely too much on the software auto-spellcheck, and I still insist on placing dots and commas outside of parenthesis (like I just did above), French-style, because it's the same as mathematics.
By now, you should be getting the gist that I'm trying to be a better writer, which then raises the more fundamental question: Writing about what? I'll maintain the suspense until tomorrow's post.
Published on July 1, 2012 at 18:41 EDT
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