Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Perfecting Your Writing Skills

Perfecting Your Writing Skills

Yesterday I worked on my RC model and got most of the glitches resolved. At the top of the list was getting the radio receiver to "shake hands" with the electronics control chip. I made some progress but it wasn’t until yesterday evening, at the flying field, that Chad helped get it completely pre-flighted. There were some new issues that came up that made the ariplane unsafe to fly. These are easy to fix, but kept me from trying the craft yesterday. It has been an adventure in persistence and frustration which is very much akin to writing a longer work.

Like building an RC aircraft, a writer isn’t finished until all the gigs are worked out of the piece they are writing. One of the things I often see is incorrect words that the grammar or spell catcher can’t pick up. Anybody who has read emails sees a host of these and while someone can usually figure out what the writer intended to say, they cause a hick-up in the flow.

Readers are more forgiving of those common email errors than they are of writers in general. A writer is expected to have a more pervasive and fluid understanding of the language and what might cause a shrug or eye roll in an email is more like an irritant in a novel. If the publisher or reader sees too many it seriously reflects on the overall quality of the work.

I would urge writers to develop a writing habit that strives for perfection. Sure there will be mistakes, but for heaven’s sake try and keep them to a minimum. Use your daily keyboarding to hone your skills in writing lucid grammatical sentences with proper and correctly spelled words.

I use my blogs, which I try to write daily, in perfecting my writing art to the best of my ability. When I write, I try and do a blog the first time through that doesn’t have any red or green highlights from the spell or grammar checker. Every time one pops up I pause and note the cause and resolve not to let that error happen again. Sometimes I get through the whole thing without an obvious mistake but understand at the same time, that lurking in what I’ve written is still a host of incorrect word, punctuation and gramatical errors.

A writer can’t help but improve if they write every day and pay attention to the details. Please don’t use my work as a guide, (or anyone else for that matter) because while there are many diligent and knowledgable writers out there you are the litmus test. Make it a habit to use your own work as a baseline and try each day to make the current effort better than the last one.