Comma, period.
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.