The hardest part of writing
The one drawback of not writing regularly is that my writing hasn't improved as much as I wanted it to. The sporadic bursts of writing, here and there, don't really contribute much to my skill set. On top of that, I'm not reading much either these days.
My natural way of writing is conversational. I write in the same tone as I talk. I had tried different styles of writing earlier, but I had to delete those posts because they didn't sound like me at all. I tried emulating Paul Graham once. And learned my lesson that I shouldn't.
A conversational tone is good even for readers; it's easy to comprehend. But there are two problems-- first, I'm verbose; second, my grammar isn't perfect. What that means is that I write a lot when I sit down to write and make random grammatical errors here and there. Now, I'm not a grammar absolutist. I'm fine with improper punctuation and improper structuring of a sentence, but some errors are too obvious to be ignored.
These aren't the biggest of issues for a writer, because almost every writer has such problems. Your first task is to just vomit out all your thoughts on the sheet of paper (or on the screen). Writing can be made cleaner, tighter, and correct later during the editing phase. And this is where the real problem lies. I don't like to edit my own posts; I hate reading them even for once.
That is why it's the most dreadful part of writing, because I can't just hit publish on my stream-of-consciousness journal. I'm not Virginia Woolf. Ideally, I would want it to be like I sit down to write, whip out 500-1000 words, hit publish, and be done with it.
If I re-read my drafts, I can probably find most (not all) of my grammatical errors and find out what are the excess sentences, but I don't like doing that at all. Earlier, I used to paste my unedited drafts into Grammarly, but it started pushing more and more AI. It started giving out suggestions that would make my writing "better." I don't want that. I mean I want my writing to be better but not like that. By following all those suggestions, you end up crafting an article that's not you at all. It sounds mechanical.
What my current writing process looks like is that I write all of my posts in Obsidian. By default, I have turned off the system spell checker because it's distracting. But when I'm done writing my draft, I turn the spell checker on so that I don't make a spelling error (that's even worse than a grammatical error). And then, for grammar check, I'm using a plugin for Obsidian; it's called Harper. I'm trying it out for a few days. My experience hasn't been good so far. It doesn't have contextual awareness. For example, at the top of this post (in my draft) I used a sentence, "…don't real contribute much to my skill set. " It didn't flag "real." It was during my re-reading that I found that out and replaced "real" with "really."
My long-term goal is to do all of this myself-- and not be reliant on any external tool. That's why I have started brushing up on my grammar, and I'm trying to write as much as possible, even if not publish that much.