Occasional Comment

After all these years I’m finally learning how to write. Or maybe it’s just that I finally have something to write about. I’ve never been afraid of writing per se but I have suffered from my share of writers block when faced with a blank page and a deadline.

As far as my personal writing projects go, I’ve often written about writing, probably because that was what I was thinking about when I sat down to write. There is a kind of transparency that one strives for when writing. You want what you are thinking to flow from your mind to the page without being conscious of how it got there. I am a touch typist so the words flow quite freely from my mind to the computer. Also, when I am writing on a computer I am less likely to try to censor the stream of thought before I get it “on paper”.

When writing with a pen, I tend to think more but I am hesitant to just get something down because rewriting is such a pain. I was one of those people that tried desperately to make my first draft do double duty as my final draft when I wrote papers in high school. I never had to write papers in college. That was probably a good thing from the standpoint of keeping my grade point average up but a bad thing from the standpoint of getting practice writing.

I finally understand what makes a good sentence, not that I pay enough attention to that while I’m writing. I should probably read Strunk and White again to reinforce the criteria for good writing. I understand how to divide your piece into paragraphs. I’m told that my writing is quite readable. I guess practice is still the prescription for improving. As I said in a prior post, that’s a major reason that I keep this blog.