💾 Archived View for juliette.zone › gemlog › bad-writing.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:50:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted 2024-06-02
I have had about a dozen blog ideas bouncing around my head since last year, and all of those have been languishing in drafts and notes apps. I cannot stress how many notes I have with bullet point outlines of posts I would like to write. None of those have yet seen the light of day, and I think I have to blame being in academia for that.
I think the kind of technical writing that gets drilled into you for communicating research is genuinely quite useful. When done well, it presents a lot of information to readers in a limited amount of space while also putting a work into the context of its field. That's awesome, and it's also completely unnecessary for a personal blog where I'm not trying to describe a technical product or scientific investigation.
I don't need to justify every stray reference to the wider world with a respectable source.
I certainly don't need to worry about if the length of my blog post is commensurate with its contribution. Why does a blog need to contribute anything?
So I'm going to give myself permission to write poorly here. And maybe elsewhere. And I'm definitely giving myself permission to do my other hobbies in a half-assed, thoroughly unimpressive way, just because I enjoy the experience of doing them. I'd rather create something flawed than nothing at all.
In that vein, hopefully more to come here and on the Professional Site.
And finally, if blog is a contraction of "web log", what's the equivalent for "gem log"? I guess "blog" is its own proper word now and can be repurposed off the web, but I do wonder if it sounded as goofy when first coined as something like "mlog" does now.