Write Much?

If you've read any of the 'blog posts' I've published here in the past few months (spoiler: you haven't), you've probably noticed that my writing is . . . . a tad terrible.

I don't think that needs to be the case. I think I have the basic language skills to be a compelling writer, but it takes a lot more than words to go from aimless rambling to coherent, digestible, and, if I dare to hope, enjoyable!

Everything is Writing

I happen to write all of the time. It's a constant practice that has increased drastically since LLMs became the indispensable tool of our time. For any given task I am writing on Discord and Slack and email to colleagues, my students, new contacts in digital communities. Besides that I am constantly writing to myself in journal entries and project notes.

I also do a massive amount of composition working through all of the code and creative tasks I work on daily. The ability to rubber-duck my blockers into Stack Overflow has become long dialogues with LLMs to clearly explain issues, state desired outcomes, and wind my way through to working solutions.

I'm thinking that the real key word of the past year isn't AI, it's Language.

Different Kinds of Writing

These are all different kinds of writing. They serve specific audiences and purposes and carry entirely different implications an consequences. I think I'm fairly good at a lot of these writing modes, but I think I have a lot of ground to make up in the format you are (maybe) reading right here.

The Blog format is newer for me. Or more like a can I've been kicking for years. Maybe I'm just starting to think up more interesting things to say or add to the conversations, I dunno why I'm picking this up again. But I have put enough writing in to tell that my craft is weak.

Goals & Intentions

I'm certainly not going to fix my poor composition in this post, but there's a few things I know I can be mindful of each time I approach a new post.

Stop jumping right in to a new post without a course at least somewhat plotted out. Most of my writing goes nowhere because the catalyst idea was a bit amorphous, or the act of writing brought up new tangents that spiral out all over the page. I will try to plan at least somewhat ahead.

Yeah I got this tendency to ramble out sentences that are longwinded. Too many clauses or something. I am aiming to keep my statements nice and tight, direct and to the point. Gotta cut back on college words too.

Wrapup

There's Brevity too so I'll honor that and see myself out now. I don't want to make my writing ambitions into some LinkedIn manifesto or pep talk, and frankly I'm not sure what my plans for this blog even are. At this stage, I'm just sharpening one more of the various skills I got. Getting better at conveying ideas, communicating about the topics I find interesting, and maybe even one day developing what you might call "voice"

And if you do happen to read anything I write, bless ya.