I am sleepy. And my forearms hurt. I think this is due to writing for too long a sustained period of time. I can only imagine the syntactical contortions that have resulted.
Well, I must yet do the editing pass, so I won’t actually have to imagine anything.
Is that anything like re-reading in daylight what one blogged much earlier in the morning? As in, 2 in the morning…
mmmm sorta.
When I do print assignments, I wring word counts out of my editors, or make them up if they are hedging, based on a 1250-words-to-page count (which is very rough).
Then I write as much as I can to rough outlines of the material without worrying about details such as spelling, grammar, run on sentences, or fact-checking. The objective here is to produce about 20% more than the word count. I try to run through as many articles in one sitting as possible.
Then I spellcheck, bust up long sentences with a jackhammer, and casually pry out instances of “and” ,”or”, “but”, “if” – any conjunction can produce two sentences, right?
When it’s a new roundup that requires fact-checking, I’ll do that somewhere along this stage. Frequently I was writing while looking at a secondary source, snd will need more infor from another secondary source, so a lot of that gets done on the fly.
Then I go after adjectives (like “casually”), empurplements, and the qualifier phrases that pad my first drafts in reflection of the way I think – I buy speech time with phrases rather than silence or “uhh…”, but they amount to the same thing.
Then I identify sections to cut in entireity.
Also, some of this happens in a more mixed up fashion – If I really think a section sucks, I’ll cut it before I tidy it up. So far, I’m blessed with heartlessness – I haven’t yet fallen in love with what’s iin the piece, because there’s always more where it came from. I actually throughly enjoy the cutting process.
Blog readers generally don’t get to see the lean, mean, post-slimmin’ prose. Here, my stuff stays fat, sleeps late, and lolls on the couch eating stale peeps.