Dictated Oct 23<\/p>\n
So for digital writing month<\/a>, I plan to write something every day. I will do so by dictating to my iPhone in bits and pieces and stolen moments, between classes, during lunch breaks, even at night in bed and inspiration suddenly hits me. I am going to try to do this with a minimum of editing except for voice recognition errors.<\/p>\n I have a lot of political, philosophical, social, religious, and educational concepts about which I want to write digitally. \u00a0For practice tonight, I’m going to reflect on why I seldom actually publish anything I write. I have in my Google drive a piece of writing called reply to Maha. It’s a response I started to make to a blog post that she wrote about being marginalized and being famous on the margins<\/a>. I haven’t posted the comment on her blog. Part of the reason is that by the time I was done writing it I had no time to go back and edit it and I did not want to post it without looking it over making sure that the grammar is correct, that I said what I actually intended to say, that I didn’t exaggerate my points, that it was carefully nuanced, etc., etc. \u00a0I keep telling my students that it’s OK to make mistakes. I tell them if they haven’t made a mistake, they probably haven’t attempted anything worthwhile. Sometime ago Carol Jager (sic) applauded me for that and then asked, “And Jim, do you allow yourself the same freedom?\u201d \u00a0No. I realize I don’t. I wonder if I feel that my reputation is too fragile to risk publishing mistakes. There’s really probably no excuse for that. The online community in which I function has been completely supportive. I have no reason to be afraid. I’m very self-conscious that I don’t have the same credentials that many of these people have, but I have plenty of evidence to show That I get nothing but encouragement when I publish something. Of course, at the back of my mind is that niggling thought, yes but all that I published has been very carefully and meticulously edited. And the things that did not meet my editing standards, or the things that I was uncertain about, or felt that I needed more time to edit \u201clater\u201d just did not get published.<\/p>\n So this digital writing month is going to be Jim Stauffer raw. Trying to speed up my writing process by taking some risks that I haven’t allowed myself before. Incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, exaggerated points that have not been carefully nuanced or completely thought out. Possibly even the wild speculations and some political incorrectness. I will not try deliberately to be inflammatory just to get responses. I don’t believe that’s Jenny wine – that’s not me.<\/p>\n (I thought that last line was just too cute to correct the voice recognition.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dictated Oct 23 So for digital writing month, I plan to write something every day. I will do so by dictating to my iPhone in bits and pieces and stolen moments, between classes, during lunch breaks, even at night in … Continue reading