4/6/02

Writing is a really weird thing for me, for several reasons. I have a problem with putting words down for the same reason I have in the past been very sparse with my words (recently I've developed the good/bad habit of speaking my mind more without much forethought). Once you say or write something, you can't often take it back. Every time I say something, I always want to add more explaining and rationalizing what I just said, because I always feel like I obviously didn't get everything across. On this website I have to stifle the urge to constantly put disclaimers on everything I write, saying this doesn't fully convey my views and why (one could easily make the argument that this entire essay is one such disclaimer). Of course, the one advantage of writing over talking is that you have the chance to think about what you're saying and compose it properly. I think we all wish at one point or another that a conversation could have an editing process.

Even when you can stop and think about what you're saying, you can almost never convey everything you'd like to with words. Speech is always a pathetic substitute for the complexity of human thought. When you state your opinion about something, be it a movie or your stance on a political issue, the words you speak or write are only simple fragments that don't take into account all of your personal background and all of the seemingly unimportant connections that you have access to in your head. If someone knows you really well, this problem is alleviated to a certain extent because they have some of that background to work with, but never fully.

Another shortcoming of spoken or written communications is relating the feelings that go along with the information you're trying to convey. Poets, writers, musicians and the like have been trying to accurately convey emotion for millenia, with varying degrees of success. I don't presume to have the ability to translate feeling in words, my writing is usually straight forward, only eliciting emotion from the reader in the form of humor or saying something they disagree with.

Writing also bothers me cause I lack one crucial quality in writing, the ability to really elaborate. I have a tendency to convey most of what I want to say in minimum of words. My 5th grade science teacher, who had us write a page a week on a current events science article, singled me out for not being verbose enough. She complained that I didn't write the full page, but still wrote a concise enough description that I didn't have anything else to say. Fortunately I never lost points for that (I know you were all worried). Now this may seem contradictory to the previous paragraph, and it may well be. However, I think the problem is not that I have gotten everything across when I write, it's that the way I write doesn't let me expand enough to get the full meaning through. This is something that I hope to work on with this site.

Something else that impedes my writing, or at least my writing well, is the fact that I write like I speak. The doesn't necessarily lend itself to good prose. One common symptom you've probably noticed by now is that I have quite a predilection towards very long sentences (although they usually avoid being technically run-on), as well as encapsulating afterthoughts in parenthesis.

In the past my writing has all been limited almost exclusively to required school work, and thus in my head has a slightly negative connotation to it. Now that I'm doing this voluntarily, I'm actually starting to enjoy it. Go figure.