I try and post daily here on EFE, and as regular readers may have noticed, don’t always succeed.
I would like to try and write daily, which is a whole other challenge. But I cannot always manage to do so, alas. And let me be clear, the reason I can’t manage either is not because of my other commitments, or my regular job, or anything like that. It is simply because I am not good enough at managing my time well.
It is, for example, 10.03 am as I’m typing this out, and today’s blog should have gone out at 10.00 am. Better late than never, I am consoling myself as I type this out.
So it goes.
One major downside of trying to write/post daily – beyond the fact that I find it difficult to build this habit – is that I am certainly unable to read through my posts once before posting. In an ideal world, I would like to sit down with each post a day after I have written it, and go over it in detail. I would like to scrub out the unnecessary adverbs, rewrite passive sentences into active ones, adjust the length of the sentences so that they sound better, and so much more from a grammatical and aesthetic perspective.
But above all, I would like to be able to take out the time to make sure that what I’ve written is clear, concise and comprehensible.
I’ve christened this blog EconforEverybody. And at least some of my posts, I am sure, aren’t for everybody. Folks without a background in econ theory might not get them, or might be turned away by the opening paragraph, or hell, even the title. And even if they do make it past these hurdles, the topic may still prove too complicated for them.
So two things for me to note, then. One, try and write as simply as possible. An admonishment that I have regularly handed out to one of my favorite students is one that I should follow myself: shorter sentences always. Simpler words, too.
Two, before clicking on the “Publish” button, try and read the whole thing once. Try and eliminate the obvious errors, at the very least. And if you can find the time to make it even simpler, please, go ahead and do so.
If I can make this a habit, my writing elsewhere will benefit too. And that can only be a good thing.
So when I write, I must simplify. Then simplify more. And then some more.
Onwards!