In Other Words

Unedited and Unabridged

Should I edit my blog? I was just sitting there at our balcony table (with windows! (the balcony, not the table)) and I was leafing through this magazine called ‘The Box’ and thinking to myself ‘should I edit my work?’ Should I take the time to read through my stuff and take out all those annoying little then and than mistakes and similar errors, or should I just keep spitting it out as fast as I can, without ever a backward glance?

I’m putting this question to you people, to answer. But before you answer lets examine the question in a little more detail. What effect will editing have on my texts? Except for the obvious improvement to both my grammar and my spelling, there will be other effects. For on thing it would mean that the nature of my posts would change. They would become less raw, less off the cuff. They would, in a way, become less sporadic thought and more structurally solid. It would still be me, of course, after all it would be me doing the editing. Yet it would be me in more layers. Less the daily me and more the ‘intellectual’ me (yeah, yeah. Laugh now! My day will come).

The actual question is probably more ‘do my mistakes bother you?’ because I don’t know if I really want to take the effort to edit everything I write. My posts would probably end up becoming far more scholarly and I’ve recently started having a real problem with the scholarly stuff. That while I’m trying to make my way through a whole host of scholarly books, like ‘Philosophy made simple’ by R. H. Popkin and A. Stroll. and similarly titled books. The interesting thing is that I find that so many of these intellectual sorts seem to intentionally hide what they are saying under layers of technical terms and flowery language.

As if they are afraid that if we really got what they meant we would ridicule them. I imagine that a highly educated man might end up being more sensitive to ridicule then a less educated man, though I might be wrong about that. After all it is often the least educated men that take the most offence to the slightest insult.

Anyway, so please tell me what you think, I’m genuinely interested to know what you think. If I will act on the information will depend on the extremity of the answers. Not extreme, no change, slightly extreme and I’ll consider editing, too extreme and all you all will get is a raised finger (I’ll let you choose which one).

So, do my mistakes, errors and failures make for more or less interesting reading (to change the question yet again)?

posted by Symbol @ 20.1.05