Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Apologies to my Readers

My Spelling Problem



I do think I'm a pretty good speller, and that I have a substantial vocabulary. And I don't think my grammar is that bad. Thus, I do apologize to my readers for my small errors, which I try to correct as I see them. I know "outrageous" is not spelled "outragious" or however I spelled it recently. And that "somethin" needs a "g" at the end. And so on. (Just to make myself feel better, I read somewhere that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a pretty bad speller - but do novelists count?).

I just think I would rather be looking at the composition of a visual image, and I really do dislike editing. If I ever become a famous writer (:-)), I will have to hire an editor right away. It's always been like this. I would rather look at the "shape" of the writing: beginning, middle and ending; how the different parts interrelate; how divergences can be rerouted to fit in with the original idea; and so on. I don't think this is laziness. Partly it is that I post almost immediately whatever I have written. Partly it really is to do with time. I admire people who can look at a sentence and edit it on the spot.

Blogging helps me to work out many ideas. The archive system allows me to file my posts by date, and thus track the evolution of my ideas. I can refer to those ideas and posts, and try to make sense of the world. For example, my twin blog Our Changing Landscape was created after I realized at Camera Lucida that Muslims (and liberals) were exerting huge amounts of influence on our culture. If this were to continue to its logical conclusion, we (or I) would have no art, architecture, design, music, literature, and all those "cultural" things that interest me, to blog about.

So, dear readers, please do have patience. And pay more attention to my overall concepts and ideas, rather than the detailed (but important) things like spelling. I will take more care of that as I continue to blog.

Now, if you see any errors in this post...