I was looking for an example in your post but didn't see one.

I probably tend to overuse commas. The rule I recall is when in doubt don't. Consider a new sentence to avoid run on. I spend most of my time avoiding conjugation errors and spelling rules since that is what annoys me most when I read.

I hate semi-colons and I doubt I have ever used one correctly.

I do like parenthetical remarks, (occasionally that is).

I hope to get around to reading some Bourdain. I have watched some of his No Reservations, and he is a fascinating guy. Notice how I used a comma before the and conjunction? I am conflicted about this. Some say don't, some say do. Go figure,I can't even find consistency.

The rules of grammar are confusing. I try to use it to control flow and readability, but I usually fail unless I agonize over editing.

I know I write better today than I did in college. My work experience improved my writing skill greatly, and forcing myself to acquire at least minimal typing skills probably made more difference than anything else. It is hard as hell to improve punctuation or any other writing related skill when you are writing longhand or using a Dictaphone.

P.S. I read somewhere recently that cursive writing is no longer taught in school. I thought that was interesting.

The tools of writing have sure changed a lot in my career. My first technical writing was on an IBM Selectric and I used a drafting table for illustrations.

But for all the labor that went into those works, they were ephemeral, and one reason that technical manuals have always had a bad rap has been that companies resent the amount of labor ($) that goes into producing something with a limited shelf life.

Much writing is ephemeral, and I think the evolution of a writing style more suited to ephemerality is probably appropriate right now given both the pace of life and the technology that gooses it. Getting the words out quite often really is more important than getting them pretty.

But that doesn’t mean that a more formal style, and the more thoughtful processes behind it, won’t survive. I think we’ll develop a “high speech” and a “common speech”, and switching fluidly between them may become the mark of an educated person.

I want the HabitableZone to be a place of where “high speech” is the standard. I was pleased to hear that this software will be used to teach writing in an online course. It’s going to leverage the strengths of a forum to let students constantly post and the instructor constantly provide feedback. It’s sort of an immersive thing: You learn to write by writing.

I know that the HabitableZone has helped quite a few people become better writers. Spend some time here soaking up the vibe, you learn to write.

The Internet Voice is a different sort of prose I still seek to master. It requires speed and few revisions. It needs a distictive, individual voice. Many rules of grammar and punctuation are being altered in the quickly evolving environment.

One of the aspects that attracted me to the Zone was the quality of the posts here. Not just the content, but the quality of the quickly written posts. Being a reader, and a rather discerning one at that, it has been a delight to participate in the discussions here. I consider my own contributions here as halting etudes in the craft. I wish I had more time for practice, because that is what it takes, and this is a great place to practice.

I have certainly benefitted by all the writing I’ve done here, but I have also developed some bad habits. I’m sloppy, lazy, in a hurry, and very often I send off my little torpedoes knowing they have typos, errors, and just plain bad writing. And sometimes I forget to set the fuse.

The skills you do develop, thinking fast on your feet, being able to respond quickly, going for the flashy rather than for depth and clarity, are all skills that are fine in conversation, but may not be appropriate for the written word. Writing is supposed to be subtle, but complete, it’s supposed to have a lot of time and effort put into it.

Conversation does not share those properties. Good writing will sound like the spoken word, but no one speaks as carefully and symmetrically as is possible to write (except for an orator who recites a written speech). Listen to a good comic sometime, George Carlin was brilliant with his use of the English language, it sounded like an informal conversation, but it was carefully crafted and rehearsed, polished, by his own admission, I heard him speak once on the topic. He was an incredibly articulate and well-read man, you can’t hide that kind of intelligence. You can be smart and clumsy with words, but not the other way round. The writer can’t use inflection and timing, gestures or voice, he has to use other mechanisms to put in the phrasing, the flow.

The same criticisms can be made for internet writing as used to be made for daily journalism: it is not really meant to be anthologized and bound into volumes for study at leisure a decade or a century later, as say, a columnist, might do.

Sure, the problems with blogging or web chats may not be solely the fault of the medium, the writer does have responsibility, no one puts a gun to my head and forces me to write sloppy prose, but the fact remains, the medium encourages it.

Still, I think my writing time here has been instructive, and the benefits probably outweigh the drawbacks. But there is very little I have submitted here I have taken the trouble to archive in my own files. And much of what I’m most proud of to have submitted here, was put together the old fashioned way, it came from my notebooks and I polished it carefully before I submitted it here. Its been curing in the vault for years.

I also believe the word processor itself is bad for the writer’s craft. Sure, its a great convenience, you can add, delete, insert, move, reformat, all sorts of things that remove the sheer drudgery of writing. But at the same time, it was the very act of having to plan ahead to avoid this drugery, making sure you had it right and planned out in your head before you committed the lines to paper; it’s a discipline we may be forgetting, and one we’ll regret losing. Even substituting the typewriter for long hand still encouraged discipline. Retyping anything was a headache, and drafts often took longer than initial composition (which is as it should be). It forced you to be much more careful with your edits when you knew how much work was involved in making one, and sometimes just moving a paragraph or even a sentence may have consequences to the logic and the flow at some deeper level, something you may not notice if you make too many of them every day.

I don’t really know, I haven’t really thought all this through. I would be interested in hearing what some of the other writers here think about these remarks.