Thursday, March 3, 2011

Two Steps Back, One Step Forward

Something interesting occurred to me today. Something, I’m sure probably doesn’t mean much in the grander scheme of things, but it got me thinking. (we all know that me actually thinking is dangerous, but we’ll ignore that for now) I was reading some older blog posts by many of our classmates, both sophmore and freshman, and I realized that writing style has a huge effect on the point one is trying to get across. Personally, I view my own style and halting and clunky, barely able to string enough words together for a coherent sentence (sometimes making me wonder why I bother at all), and I see many of my classmates with similar problems. And then I stumbled upon some posts that were beautifully written... I looked at them, read them, and my first thought was that I was insanely jealous of this person who could actually get a thought down on their page without sounding like a lunatic. But then I actually looked at the writing. I saw that this person had a huge vocabulary, which was one of the things that made the writing flow, it wasn’t redundant every other sentence. It was also obvious that they put a lot of time and thought into their posts.

It made me wonder. Why, when so many of the people at ASTI (and indeed, outside of ASTI) have the potential to be great writers, couldn’t seem to be able to achieve this level of skill. And of course, I am including myself in these people that probably could, but don’t... I don’t really know what I’m trying to say anymore, but this insight into writing, into the world, made me think of how much harder I could work, and how much better I could do. If only I’d get my feet under me and do it.

No comments:

Post a Comment