Regarding this 1400 word post one of my new corespondents offered me some literary criticism. I was delighted. It was the first literary analysis of my blog ever and probably the first I’ve gotten on any of my writing since high school.
I was taken by a sentence in one of your posts recently. When I went to find it, I believe it was changed to: “I just think they are blinded by their self righteousness.” I believe the former was, “They are blinded by the knowledge of their own goodness.” I liked the latter. It is lyrical and comes across as profound but not pretentious.
I explained that I have gotten into the habit of editing my posts immediately after posting them. I do this knowing that I’ll find typos a little more easily looking directly on the blog. I don’t worry about bad mistakes or poor word choice when I do this late into the evening because only the Ukrainians or Australians are reading at that time of the night. Even during the day I don’t worry about it too much. To me its like letting folks watch me sculpt my snow sculptures. I don’t mind if they see them in the process of construction. There is always the possibility that they will copy an unpolished text and spread it around but I haven’t worried about that as much as perhaps I should.
I just checked to see if I could find an earlier version of this post. My blog software does periodic saves during my writing but there was no evidence of my putative earlier sentence. Its quite likely that is how I first put it. I agree that the preferred language is more straightforward and less hackneyed. As for poetic……that may have been an accident on my part.
If I did switch to harping about “Self righteousness” that’s probably because its a phrase that everyone is familiar with whereas “goodness” seems a little more childlike. I guess I opted for old fart wording to sound more sophisticated. That doesn’t say much for sophistication does it?
