Touched Up

I am somewhat forgetful. Although that's not really the correct way to put it. It's likely more accurate to say that I can be inattentive, and thus liable to forget things that I would otherwise remember. It's a trait that I've lived with for  I am also, it turns out, something of a perfectionist, and that makes it difficult to leave well enough alone.

These paired traits prompt me, from time to time, to go back through Nobody In Particular and see what I have written in the past. And when I find errors, to update them. Even to the point of deleting posts.

Other than the fact that I'm bad about proofreading posts before I publish them, this exercise has shown me that I have a tendency to be verbose when I have the time to really work on a post. That was part of the rationale behind The Short Form; to not pontificate at length about a topic that I'd put enough thought into that I was able to distill it down into a sentence or two. Especially when all that I would otherwise be doing is complaining about something or someone. (Despite the fact that I'm not all that happy with the generally negative tone of Nobody In Particular, I know myself well enough to realize that it's not going anywhere; in part due to my personality, and in part due to the media that I take in.)

While posts that are condensed down enough to qualify for The Short Form strike me as more sophisticated, my longer (or over-long) posts strike me as being more thoughtful. I suspect that this is due to seeing long-form journalism as being less click-bait than short-form journalism, which sometimes seems to be little more than factoids wrapped in bits of superfluous verbiage. In any event, since this exercise has yet to make me into an amazing writer, I'm going to keep going back and making long after the fact edits to posts, and catching glimpses of the self gone by in so doing.