If you read any of my posts, you will find mistakes that other (real) writers would baulk at. I would love to tell you that I don’t care if they baulk. But I do care—I care a lot—just not in the way you're probably imagining.
Why it bothers me?
It bothers me because I can already see the mistake(s). I know they are all there, but I can’t do a damn thing about it!
Spelling, grammar and sentence structure
I can look at my writing and see the errors like a pair of headlights set on full beam at night. They're blindingly obvious: grammatical errors, long sentences, overuse of adjectives (and adverbs), double negatives. They're all there, refusing to budge like a throbbing headache!
I use an online service called Grammarly to help. Grammerly (and similar services) are not a silver bullet, and can be more of a hindrance! But it’s better than nothing. Even if the benefit is only psychological.
I will do my best to correct my writing. Proofreading and editing like a man possessed. This process is usually in vain and the beginning of an even bigger issue I wrestle with every post I write.
What I NEVER use and never will is any sort of generative AI. All my writing, errors included, are 100% me! For this, it is not apologetic.
But, that‘s not what infuriates the most!
Transcribing my monologue
What really frustrates me is I can't transcribe the monologue I've written in my head. Try as I might to write it down, it ends up reading like a coded message Alan Turing couldn’t decipher.
So I attempt to write it again and again. Until it eventually looks like I’ve dropped a game of Scrabble on the floor. The damn thing is, for some inexplicable reason, it then reads perfectly fine to me.
That’s is until my human editor, my wife Sarah attempts to proofread it.
Sarah will ask me to decipher a section and once again it's turned into nothing more than pure gibberish!
So the process starts again.
I write it again… and again editing As I go.
It's an endless cycle that makes me feel like I’m trapped in a prison within my own mind!
The time it takes!
The last and the final agonising aspect of my dyslexia is the amount of time it takes for me to write… anything. Including this post.
What might takes Sarah an hour to write, will take me four hours!
This post, for example! Can you guess how long it took for me to write? 7 hours and 198 edits according to Google Docs.
That's ridiculous by any metric, and not maintainable.
Finally, why do I bother to write
Writing is bloody hard work. It’s uncomfortable and, at times, incomprehensible.
I love that challenge of writing and the process of trying to produce something legible. Even I pull my own hair out and shorten my life expectancy by 1 month for each post.
Writing is therapy and an escape when I’m at home and not able to be on trail or up a mountain.
So until the day writing becomes easy… I’m going to keep writing. Because ultimately nothing in life worth doing is ever going to be easy!
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