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This is a Tribute, to the Greatest Blog Post in the World…
This is the not the greatest blog post in the world… nooo… this is just a Tribute.
All joking aside, I deleted 3 post drafts this morning. They were drafts that I had started long ago but I just couldn’t seem to fine-tune them enough for publishing. Perhaps one of them was the greatest post in the world. We just won’t know. One was a comparison of blog to newspaper evolution. The second was on the balance of leadership and collaboration for execution. The third was a post criticizing the Direct Mail industry comparison of snail mail to email.
For you bloggers out there, how often do you rewrite or delete a post altogether before publishing it? I probably toss 1 or 2 a week.
I must admit I do not have any kind of ‘fine-tuning’ my writing skills are that bad that any further attempt to fine-tune reduce wordcount = 0. I do on occasion use the literary skills of my good wife to reduce the grammar error level down from ‘terrible’ to ‘low level’ but she is alas not always around when I need to ‘go live’.
Do I think my English skills affect my readership? I have no idea, people are certainly not coming to read my article because of the quality of writing, so at what point does bad grammar/spelling put people off? I have not obviously plunged to those depths yet.
I do have unfinished articles which may forever stay unpublished just because I think they are a bad idea in general not because of the actual content in itself.
Grammar is my Achilles heel, Nick. I often preview a post and make changes to it 5 or 6 times before I publish it. After I publish my posts, I often have to edit out additional grammatical errors.
I don’t have a wife to check my work… but perhaps I can afford an editor someday. That would be fantastic!
Hey Doug:
I gotta say it is a little unnerving that you are watching over my shoulder…just how is it that you knew I had deleted 3+ drafts that just weren’t ‘tunable’? Huh?
Good one!
– Papa
Perhaps it was some weekend cleaning on both our parts, Papa! 🙂
At least one a day, per blog I’m authoring. Sometimes it’s as simple as the title. My rule of thumb is that if I can’t make the title alluring, at minimum it goes to draft status.
Hi Doug!
I just discovered your BLOG and find you are a prolific writer. My biggest challenge is getting a groove going and possible dedication to the process.
I started my BLOG in April of 07, this year. And I have moments where I am truly inspired and others where I am blahhh! I have had a few instances where brief ideas have turned into nothing.
You are an inspiration for me though…and thanks to you! From one Tenacious D Fan to Another… 🙂
You just made my day, Christina! Thanks! And Rock On! 😉
Since I started, which is not that long ago, I seem to find 2:1 working for me i.e. out of 2 initial ideas I publish one and the other one goes back to the drafts. I only recently started to keep drafts for later publishing, and seeing the process as an iterative one.
How do you balance keeping drafts to work on and not letting them go old, and acknowledging the fact that week is a very long time in the blogosphere? Of course subject related, but was wondering whether you need to trash a lot of possible good posts because they have gone old.
And yes, I preview and make changes to it around 4 to 5 times as well, before finally posting it out there.
It’s good to know I’m not alone, Ville!