Currently Working On….
An op-ed piece with an evening deadline. I will return to normal blogging when finished.
UPDATE:
Whoa! That took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Dang – I’m rusty! LOL! I’ll post a link here when and if it runs.
Prior to blogging, I was a pretty fair writer of formal papers, academic listserv discourse, letters to the editor and op-ed kinds of writing. Getting into gear as a blogger gradually killed those activities off and as blogging-style writing puts a higher premium on speed, insight and relevance than on grammatical precision, polish and elegance, I found getting through this assignment tough going at first. Much like 
putting on a suit from a few years ago – not everything fits quite right. At least first.
Very good for my brain though and it gave me a chance to shift my perspective and reflect a little more deeply on how I was writing and not just the substance of what I was writing about. Clarity matters. Words matter. A tight limit on word count disciplines a writer to be more concise, more economical with their prose. I cut at least a quarter from the first draft and put in only half of the points from my notes that I had thought were important. They all weren’t. In retrospect, some were only mildly interesting or gratuitous and would have distracted the reader. A good lesson here for me to make an effort to try my hand at op-eds more frequently, if only to keep myself sharp.
For the readers out there who are bloggers – how has blogging affected your writing ?
July 12th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Blogging made me concise. Twitter has made me ultra-concise. I may soon be reduced to grunts.