I've spent the past few days looking at stuff I've written -- emails, comments on blogs, articles, bachelor's theses (just the one, actually), rants on forums, and almost anything else that I can get my hands on -- in the hope of being able to view my prose objectively and therefore improve it.
A little context here -- it's really difficult for me to criticize (positively or negatively) my own writing, especially after I've just written it. The loss of perspective while surveying one's own work is of course widely known, and I will not go into it here. Suffice it to say that I can only view my written work with either extreme pride or intense disgust; objectivity, during these occasions, is a distant dream.
I used to spend the first few months when I discovered this woods-for-trees phenomenon groping about in contrived self-pity. Here, I thought, was a perfectly good person (myself), in pursuit of a perfectly admirable goal (writing a good book). And what should come between the goal and its execution but my stupid ego and its frustrating inability to understand my writing. Woe was me.
No longer, because I have belatedly discovered that I can blog (oh, how I despise that verb!) about it. For the next few weeks or so, I will be putting up sporadic thoughts about my writing and how I can improve it. These blog posts will highlight my inadequacies as a writer by primarily focusing on patterns that have surfaced in my prose over the period of the past three years. If nothing else, these articles should at least serve as interesting exercises in style.
The uninterested (who number, no doubt, in the billions) should avert their eyes now.
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