Web zines are geared more towards immediacy, rather than polished sheets of sounds.
“Essential McLuhan” (Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, Frank Zingrone)
Marshall McLuhan
“I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.”
vs.
Marinate your blog posts before you publish
...ease of publishing can lead to incomplete thoughts and less-than-stellar writing...We do our short posts on the fly here at Lifehacker, but feature articles start percolating several days (if not weeks) in advance of publishing, and the “marinated” stuff always reads a bit better.
We tend to create our posts quickly, and publish the first draft, occasionally catching grammatical and other errors, sometimes not. There are a few times where posts lingered, unpublished, but what tends to happen is that these stay unpublished forever. Glancing quickly at my ecto blog database, I have 2502 entries published (since Nov 04 when I moved to movabletype), and 6 unpublished 'drafts'. These drafts have been untouched for months, years even, and will probably never see the light of day (except for the aborted Amoco building photograph sale to some biatch named Heather Esser that I will publish that once my rage subsides).
In our business life we buff our prose almost to the point of obsession. A typical (important) business letter or email goes through multiple re-writes, with both D and I as editors-in-chief.
In University of Texas days, any paper that I scheduled enough time to create a rough draft and then re-write was always better, and thank the pasta gods for blue book tests, especially the tests that I had enough time to spend some time creating a rough draft in my mind. Words are our friends.
Blogs are different beasts, and our off-the-cuff snarky style takes brief seconds to compose and publish. McLuhan was right, in this quote anyway. Of course, we are not 'professional' bloggers, so always taking the time to write clearly is not a priority.
What about you?
Tags: blogosphere
Most of the marinating goes on in my head, sometimes over days, other times overnight. Unfortunately haste makes waste. Sometimes I find phrases and sentences that deserved a red mark "Clarity?"
But then it's too late and time to turn to next task.
I completely agree with the comment by Tina Harris. I marinate in my head occasionally jotting down ideas in my handy notebook. I try to make notes to be sure and hit x, y, and z before posting. Of course, hours later on subsequent re-reads, I almost always end up groaning over huge grammatical errors or my abuse of English. My inner editor would love a red pen.