I can’t tell you the name of my 11th grade Eng­lish teacher. I do remember she took issue with my lack of tech­nical writing skill. I was not very good at fig­uring out when to use a comma, and – despite her best efforts – I don’t know that I’m much better at it now. And my prob­lems are not just with commas. In gen­eral, I’m a sloppy writer.

My girl­friend has recently been showing my per­sonal web­site work (like this blog) to her co-workers. She works at a com­pany that pub­lishes news­pa­pers. She’s a designer but she knows a number of copy edi­tors. The first thing they see when the look at my work are the errors. I think she’s a little embar­rassed. She’s Chi­nese. I’m the one who’s sup­posed to be edu­cated in English.

So this weekend my assign­ment is editing. I have over one hun­dred posts on this blog and another dozen or so on a new site I’m building. I need to re-read the recent work and cor­rect my poor punc­tu­a­tion, defi­cient dic­tion, godawful grammar, and ter­rible typos. If I really want people to read these web­sites (and why would I pub­lish them if I didn’t) then my writing ought to be of higher quality. At the very least it should be tech­ni­cally cor­rect. In gen­eral, I believe my writing to be decent. I simply have dif­fi­cul­ties trans­lating thoughts into words. When my mind is on a roll, I cannot type or write fast enough. And when you’re going fast, you tend to run things over. When writing fast, those things are grammar and spelling.

I really should slow down and trust that the thoughts will still be there, waiting patiently for their key­strokes or penstrokes.