Thursday, February 16, 2012

Editing Posts

I wish I could sit down and whip off pages of graceful prose or riveting stories. I can't. Writing is hard for me and I struggle with it. I maintain this blog for practice, as much as anything.

Because most of my posts are factual and engineering-oriented, I like them to be correct. Because most of my traffic is via forums and search engines, most of my traffic is reading and re-reading older posts. In a typical month only 20% of the traffic is directed at posts from that month, and generally 30-50% is directed at a short list of 10 posts that were written months to years before. For example, this week 10% of the traffic was to a single 2-year old post on sea anchors. Thus, I often go back and add new material to old posts, rather than start something new. While there are certainly errors and poorly written bits here and there, I try to correct anything that is pointed out to me as unclear or just wrong. Sometimes I correct the revision date, but sometimes I don't. I almost always revise posts a few times in the first few weeks, if it's a post of any substance.

I hope you use the "search" function occasionally, anytime you wonder about some dumb thing I said in the past. I may have smartened up and fixed it. If it was a rant, well, I may have piled on more!

Enjoy.

1 comment:

  1. Drew, this reminds me of what a bibliography prof told our class (a music research class): I'm not a great writer, but I'm a pretty good re-writer. That certainly describes me as well.

    I think your posts are very, very informative and I appreciate your thoroughness and clarity.

    Rick

    ReplyDelete