{"id":2780,"date":"2008-07-11T15:54:11","date_gmt":"2008-07-11T15:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2780"},"modified":"2008-07-12T05:15:54","modified_gmt":"2008-07-12T05:15:54","slug":"currently-working-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2780","title":{"rendered":"Currently Working On…."},"content":{"rendered":"

An op-ed piece with an evening deadline.\u00a0 I will return to normal blogging when finished.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whoa! That took a lot longer than I had anticipated.\u00a0Dang – I’m rusty! LOL! I’ll post a link here when and if it runs.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Very good for my brain though and it gave me a chance to shift my perspective\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

For the readers out there who are bloggers – how has blogging affected your writing ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An op-ed piece with an evening deadline.\u00a0 I will return to normal blogging when finished. UPDATE: Whoa! That took a lot longer than I had anticipated.\u00a0Dang – 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}