I’ve been blogging for a little over two years now at one site or another. It is a good time to make some observations about my blogging.
First I’ve noticed that my blogs can become repetitive. No, I’m not taking about my writing style, which is pretty, for the most part, unedited and therefore sometime repetitive. Besides a very minimum level of spelling and grammar checking done by the word processor program I use to first write a blog these post are written on the fly.
I found out blogs can become kind of repetitive because the same topics or issues come up again and again, the same holidays come around every year and human experience is repetitive daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The blog may start to reflect this repetitious nature of things.
I’ve noticed the repetitive nature of many of my sentences and paragraphs. I’ve also noticed other English mistakes like punctuation, run-on or incomplete sentences, spelling errors (yes, even the spelling correcting abilities of the word processor program can’t catch all mistakes) and a general disorganization of most of my prose. All of this is expected and okay for a blog in my opinion.
As I have said on numerous occasions about writing blog entries I have no intention of making them a major project. I am not going to write a blog at a college essay, research paper, or any other professional standard. Why make blogging such a big burden?
My blog is a journal of opinions and things I’m thinking about doing or have done. On another blog site I deal with more of what some would call weighty issues. At this site I deal mostly with issues that are considered a little less important like my interest in computing, movies, music and personal stories from my past.
I blog mainly for myself so I try to make the prose clear enough for me to read and understand at some future time. Sometime I fail at this attempt at clarity and sometime I succeed. I personally feel that good writing needs only one thing and that’s clarity, which I constantly strive for.
I’ve been told one way to help in clarity is to make my sentences shorter but when I’m writing something down directly from thought to do so is easier said than done.
I do know that I use parentheses a lot and sometime there is a lot of information enclosed in them. This tends to interrupt the flow of the prose but it is the way I’m thinking. There are times when a thought will come out of ‘right field’ that my not quite fit in with the words, sentences or paragraphs I just wrote and to add the text expressing that thought at that point in writing would be too out of place but still the thought is germane to what I am talking about therefore the use of the parentheses. There are also the more standard reasons to use parentheses like for a quick definition of a term, example or to provide a little more detail. All these possible situations mean that a lot of parentheses are used in my blogs.
Then there are the mistakes that happen mainly because I do not have an editor. I recently said a singer had a CD that was pretty good called ‘Laundry Room’ when the name was actually ‘Laundry Service’. This type of error happens a lot when I write about movies or music. I catch and correct these errors when I can but it is not a top priority since (as I’ve said) I write my blogs mainly for myself and I know what I’m trying to say even if I write it wrong.
I hear there are millions of blogs out there now. Many blogs seem to be professional write-ups on a topic (usually political). I just can’t help but think that individuals are getting paid to write a blog (s) on a specific subject that pushes a point of view.
Even those that are not being compensated are trying to make their blogs more professional looking. They are being as grammar proper as possible and using the style of a college essay, research paper or professional columnist.
As I hit my 108th blog at joeuser I find myself still thinking about blogging on my own website. I’ll have to refresh my knowledge of web page authoring. It will take more time to set up a website because I will have to design the site from scratch. This is something I do not have to worry about now because the sites I use supply templates that one can use (although the other site I blog at allows one to use their own templates).
I also still may combine my blogs and post everything on one site. I may start using only one of the sites (this one or the other site) and progress to my own site. Then again, I may do nothing. Everything is up in the air.
Well, this is my review (up to today) of my blogging experience. It is also repetitive since I have done this before at this site and other sites but it’s always nice to review.