A couple of years ago, I wrote an editorial as an EIC that received a lot of praise from similarly minded (liberal) faculty at my high school, but a good amount of finger-shaking from the administration. How I interpreted the situation in its aftermath, however, is formative in how I write pieces that I intend to put out publicly.
I think that precisely conveying your thoughts is a challenging thing, and an interesting pursuit. I have always loved playing around with words, putting odd combinations together to form a more stimulating description. Recently, as I write mostly non-fiction pieces, I feel like I'm riding on a hyperbola: each edit brings me to a sentence that is closer to the thought in my head, but the sentence never matches the thought completely.
Because I haven't learned how to write as accurately as I think is necessary, I do not trust myself to editorialize, at least not yet. Outside-imposed censorship is bad and sharing opinions is vital, but I think that recognizing the limitations of your own knowledge and your own arguments is just as important. There will always be people who disagree with you and who will argue against your arguments and who will chastise you and demonize you, especially as the writing gets more interesting and relevant.
But what if someone who doesn't know the subject well internalizes your ideas? What if someone misinterprets what you are saying because of faulty language, and internalizes something you never meant to say? What then? How do you feel as an "author"? And how do you feel when readers find out that you haven't done as much research and thinking as you should? Blogs have such a bad rep--a good number of blog authors write as I did in high school--they want to be heard, but take too little time to edit and fact-check what they are transmitting. Take this psychological phenomena--false information is released and people dismiss it at that time. The false information is repeated a couple of months later, and the same people believe it because they heard it before. I don't want to be the author of false information. I don't want to sensationalize anything. I see writing as permanent, and I personally don't want to look back ten years later and cringe at the generalizations and factual screw-ups I made. I think that having the medium to self-publish gives authors an extra responsibility (if they want to be taken seriously) that used to be attributed to editors of formal institutions--and blog authors should remember that.
I have thought for a long time whether or not to discuss the more serious topics on this blog. I think it would be worthwhile, but I think that if I ever do so, it would be 95% factual, 5% interpretation of the facts--I will never pound out several paragraphs of straight out admonishment or praise, but do expect a compilation of facts and opinions by better-versed authors. "Write about what you know" is good advice.
Onto the topic of web monikers. I want one. I think it jazzes things up. I'm going to try out Frites. I thought myself really clever as I came up with this at 3 in the morning (all my ideas seem terrific at 3 in the morning). Frites-->Hi Frites-->Heifetz Get it?
Image by wikipedia user Rainer Zenz used under a Creative Commons license.
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