Improving the Blog Would Be Difficult

This is the third part of a 43 part-series on ways to improve my blog. Improving this blog seems like an easy task as there’s nowhere really to go but up… and no one to really impress. The series, like the blog itself, might be best summed up as delusions of grandeur.

A couple days ago I posted about my travel time to and from the lake where I eat lunch often. It was a pretty good addition to the virtual treasure trove of excellence in fine writing found within this website. It did however have its flaws.

I have already had to make one correction. I probably could make many, many more.

I mention at the end of that post that the main point I wanted to convey when I began writing was not the one that I stressed the most. In writing the thing, I had a realization that changed my perspective on the issue. I feel like a true writer would have at that point scrapped what they had already written and started over.

I typically don’t do that, but a better blog needs that. A better blog needs someone to give it the old once-over to make sure it makes sense and is focused and on-target. Posts should be easy and enjoyable to read, but I freely admit that sometimes these posts can be a challenge to read. (Heck, more often than not they are a challenge to write.)

Perhaps, the blog needs someone else at the helm. This person would not only see my vision but mold it into a better vision. This means that they would appreciate my John Duffy-glorification and meaningless babble, maybe resulting in meaningless glorification of John Duffy babble.

A big problem is that too often I operate under a unique, self-imposed interest-crunch. Similar to a time-crunch, I try to write as much as I can about everything loosely connected to what I’m writing about until I run out of interest in it. Then I hit publish. While I try to catch mistakes as I go along, I hardly ever go back to edit any of the content in it. It would not be easy to put the extra time into it or to delete lines that I thought enough of to write down, but that’s exactly what I need to improve, editing the content.

If the aim is simply to improve the blog, however, perhaps I should begin by editing the small stuff. It wuold be nice not have any glaring errors like misspelled or dropped words.

For what it’s worth, I tried to rewrite this post from scratch after my first attempt wasn’t very good. They are quite different, but similarly uninteresting, as I follow the same path of stuffing each post with random thoughts of interest that I allude to in both. It can be seen after the jump if you have any desire to read it. I am impressed and grateful that you’ve read this much, so congratulations! You’re done!




For me, writing a blog is nothing more than a bad habit similar to model airplanes and origami. I spend all this time writing a post about whatever’s on my mind and, if I’m lucky, somebody might come along and think, “Oh that’s kinda cool,” and than go about there business. Meanwhile, all I see when I look back at any particular post are the flaws and errors.

I am sure everyone sees the glaring mistakes. The misspelled and dropped words are probably the easiest to spot, but I can chalk them up to honest mistakes. The many grammatical errors are pretty hard to read back through as I worry they make me sound a way that I don’t want to sound, to put it gently. The worst, from my perspective, is the excess words and garbled thoughts that clutter up so much of each post. Therefore, a big improvement in this blog would be to implement the edit.

My writing process with this blog usually consists of having a thought, begin writing about said thought, think of a clever line, abandon original idea to focus on clever line, remember that I had an original idea but struggle to remember it, write gibberish in hopes that it comes back to me, reread first paragraph and tie conclusion to something mentioned there. Then hit publish. Ideally, this would not be the case.

In a perfect world, I would have the time to submit my writing to someone who would read through it to point out the mistakes and offer helpful suggestions. In a truly perfect world, this person would be named Doug and speak in the third person. He would live in a small tent and I would barter goods for his advice. Even if the editor was myself, that would help a lot.

Often as I write, stringing along too many ideas at once, I am reminded of my 12th grade English teacher. Everything we wrote was graded on, I think, six factors, each weighted equally. I don’t remember any of them except for Conciseness, which was usually written all over my papers. It’s an interesting concept to focus on in writing and something I always consider.

I guess what I’m getting at is that in order to form a more perfect blog, I need to cut the boring stuff out, learn to let go of what doesn’t work. This post for instance should have just been about my high school English teacher.