first draft

[ironymaiden]

what you see here is a first draft. (with checks for good spelling and html.) it's a choice. i consider lj to be closer to a diary entry or a letter than anything else.

do you polish before you hit "update journal"? do you care about an audience? why?

Comments

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth: I polish. LJ is a proto-essay ground for me, generally - but I'm also mildly obsessive about the quality of language that I use, which means that I rewrite emails and insignificant comments, too.

[ironymaiden]

i do rewrite emails. comments depend on the venue; i don't send something to seattle unless i've vetted it very carefully.

do you expect to reuse your essays elsewhere?

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

No, but the essay form is how I do some of my best thinking / wordsmithing. I'm frequently concerned with making words do what I want - not only in terms of meaning, but also in fuzzier ways - I try to use light amounts of internal rhyme, and I pay attention to where syllable stresses fall. By writing to that form, I keep in practice. (Or, as lately, by not writing at all, I fall out of practice.)

[msanborn.livejournal.com]

I load it as private first, then proof read it, then go back and edit/fix anything else that people might point out.

I'm anal, not necessarily "audience concerned"

[mimerki.livejournal.com]

I do a light edit for clarity/spelling and such, but certainly not polish. I wouldn't point a potential employer to my lj and say "This is representative of my work." I would not be embarassed if a (potential) employer *saw* my lj; it is representative of a phase of anything I write.

I am concerned about audience to a small degree but mostly in the form of filters and lj-cuts. I am not hiding my spirituality from laridian but she is an SF/RPG/writing-friend and a Catholic. She could read those entries if she wanted, but I don't feel she needs them cluttering up her f-page. Similarly, I'll cut for language because I don't want her 5-yr old reading over her shoulder and asking why the Navy wives are f***ing c***s.

[ivy]

This is mostly where I am. I do read through my entry, once typed, looking for spelling errors and poor phrasing, but I don't give it the heavy edit that anything intended for real publication sees. I generally filter on what I think people would be interested in reading, though I do also have a few more private filters. I write for my audience in that I try to present interesting discussion topics and anecdotes, and I kill about 25% of my proto-entries as "too boring, no one cares". (Dear LiveJournal, today I went grocery shopping. I got eggs, orange juice, and kale. The kale was on sale! Hey, kale rhymes with sale!) But I don't hesitate to discuss something that I genuinely find interesting out of fear that no one else will like it. (Dear LiveJournal, today I read a fourth-century text in Latin that discussed the relationship between Christianity and Roman religion...)

[ouroborous.livejournal.com]

Yes (I polish).

If this were truly a diary, I'd -- use a diary. It's something else, and if we really didn't care about our audience we'd either use good old-fashioned pen and paper, or make all of our entries private.

I don't pander to my audience, but they matter (all 4 of them ;) and if I make my writing more approachable I figure it's more likely that it will have an impact.

[mrdorbin.livejournal.com]

I can't compose without editing, which means that I'm reading the sentence to myself as I go and changing it if it sounds off to me. But once it's done I don't do anything else to it.

(For example, I stopped after 'as I go' and added 'to myself' in, and switched 'changing it to' to 'changing it if' once I realized what I really want to say. I do like my sentences to flow.)

I will edit what I think of as more formal pieces, but they're rare these days.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

Depends. When I'm brooding about climbing or writing I revise.

[thegreymouser.livejournal.com]

Content-wise, I let my hands type whatever my brain is thinking, sans filters. Quite often, I might look at the entry again and think to myself gee, that's probably inappropriate, but I usually let it stand. However, I will abuse the "edit most recent entry" button to fix spelling/grammerical errors and to make it sound less Engrish.

BTW, what's with the trend to not use capital letters? Sure they're pretensious, but they're required.

[ironymaiden]

i dunno about buhrger, but i'm not a great typist. okay i don't think i'm very good because i got C's in typing in high school and my mom was a secretary for 30 years; ymmv.
i used to eliminate the shift key to make it all less laborious. now that i do a lot of typing at work (with proper caps) i end up spending energy avoiding the shift key when i'm not doing work stuff. i'd stop being all pretentious with it except that in my natural state the caps come and go and it looks really silly.

[boldfeather.livejournal.com]

pure unadulterated laziness.

[buhrger]

damn straight!

[bhagwanx.livejournal.com]

Content-wise, I let my hands type whatever my brain is thinking, sans filters. Quite often, I might look at the entry again and think to myself gee, that's probably inappropriate, but I usually let it stand. However, I will abuse the "edit most recent entry" button to fix spelling/grammerical errors and to make it sound less Engrish.

I edit constantly, in every aspect of my life. I'll step all over an entry two or three times before it goes live, and then tool it up at least once afterwards.

I swear at the screen a lot, as well. Clearly, it conspires with the keyboard against me.

BTW, what's with the trend to not use capital letters? Sure they're pretensious, but they're required.

LIES. really, Punctuation and Spelling require only the barest of controls to Function properly. fr exmple, y cn read ths mssage Fin w/o 1/2 teh vowels and Crazed Wurds.

Your mileage may vary. In one of his books, my friend John Dalmas had his protagonist (then acting as POTUS) chuck out the rules of English grammar entirely in favor of a phonetic spelling system, to combat an illiteracy rate of over 50%.

that book (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671653849/002-9605894-5992842?v=glance&n=283155) is more frightening every year, as it's milieu gets closer and closer to our own.

[buhrger]

Sure they're pretensious, but they're required.
rilly? does this mean that i've been brayking the laugh for decades now? are the capitalization police (capitalists, natch) going to put a black hood over my head and drag me orf?

[pixxelpuss.livejournal.com]

Minor edits while I type if I think I'm failing to be clear or saying something I don't want anyone I know to hear. If I left these public or didn't carefully screen who sees each entry I'd edit a hell of a lot more. Most of the problems I've had with a lack of editing have less to do with content and more to do with oversensitive or insane readers.

[buhrger]

do you polish before you hit "update journal"? do you care about an audience? why?
mildly, and mildly

if i didn't care at all about an audience, i wouldn't make my entries viewable to anyone, would i? (or, wait, that's if i didn't want an audience)
longer, more complicated posts tend to get written up beforehand, and then i'm likely carefuller with what i write, and the end result is polisheder. (note: in my idiolect, polisheder writing still includes words like "carefuller" and "polisheder" :-) and if i notice an irritating tyope after the fact, i'll likely return and fix it, but my most common after-the-fact-edits are likely additions of links.

why? hmn. dunno. i don't ultimately see myself as a writer, and so don't feel defined by my writing (described, certainly, but not defined). my audience is entirely people i know already anyway, so it's not like they're suddenly discovering that i'm an illiterate boob.

[kyooverse.livejournal.com]

No, I don't polish before I hit "update journal." The reason why I don't polish is because... well, I guess I have turned some corner and while I know this is writing, it is really communication. I struggled for a very long time to write the way I talk although I have gone through years where I felt more comfortable with written communication vs verbal communication.

But also, I don't polish because my ego does not need it and because I am writing this to other people in a non-professional capacity. My ego does not need to care whether you think I am an idiot because I spelled something incorrectly and I am learning that I cannot be friends with those people anyway so why bother? Some people are tight and rigid about stuff and focus more on what is written than the actual content of what is written. That's them -- fine. But I don't want to be that kind of person and I am responsible for Q. Ergane so... I don't polish. Hell, I don't even re-read. I trust myself and you.

I care too much about audience sometimes. I have to remind myself that audience changes depending on where you are writing and etc. -- one should not treat everything the same because everything is NOT the same. Why do I care about audience? Because communication does not happen in a bubble. Sometimes I am too aware of that and not aware enough of what I need to communicate. But I am working on that.

Good post.