From Point A to Point B

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss suggests that proper punctuation is equivalent to proper manners. Navigating your reader through your writing is an act of courtesy. Providing all the full stops, left turns, warnings, and clear directions helps you bring along your audience so that they aren't distracted trying to figure out what you mean.

I am new to blogging, and my first thoughts are that this will be challenging as a writer to develop, maintain, and improve because it seems that the essence of blogging is a sort of off-the-cuff commentary on a given subject. Random thoughts, specific interests, whatever -- but it does come back to learning how best to communicate. How not to fall into the trap of assuming that anything that comes into my head is worth writing (or worthwhile for someone else to read).

So, with that said, I intend to use this blog as a dialogue on writing. To learn how to improve my writing by making myself write, but also to develop a quicker hand at editing and not bog myself down in endless revisions. To find that balance between too much work and too little. To get myself from my first draft to the final version. Because it seems to me that when we learn to write, we're usually given completed works as our guidelines (e.g., A Tale of Two Cities, A Mid-Summer Night's Dream), but we never get to witness how Dickens or Shakespeare or any other writer muddled through their multiple drafts to reach their final product. I've spent a lot of time at Point A. Next stop needs to be B.