I’m guessing that a lot of us blog just because we like to write. Some of us have to write. Either way, we each expect that our writing skills improve with regular practise.

Though at some point our skills reach a plateau and advance no further without the guidance of a coach, a mentor, or in the case of writers, an editor. As Yukon Jen recently said of editors, “Find a good one. Work with them. You will become a better writer.”

Sadly, I can’t afford an editor. Sadder still, I funded my beer fridge as an editor of academic papers in my university days. I mercilessly hacked away at run-on sentences, weak-kneed arguments, uncited assertions, and the mystifying allure of the word “thus.” One of my clients made it into Osgoode Law on the strength of his essays, so I figure I once knew something of the art.

Even for a former amateur editor, self-editing is difficult. After searching for the perfect turn of phrase for half-an-hour, how many of us are willing to strike it from the screen for the trifling reason that it doesn’t add any meaning to the text? A wasted thirty minutes is damned meaningful to the writer, far less so to the editor, and not a bit to the reader.

I reckon the next best thing is to acknowledge my own writing mistakes, especially the mistakes that I make over and over again, despite knowing that they’re mistakes. Those are the ones my inner editor must attack first. Looking through the past few years of blog posts, I’ve collected the following reasons why I’m not a better writer.

Sesquipedalian Grandiloquence

Translation: using big words just to sound impressive.

This has to be my worst writing sin. The odd thing is that the biggest words appear in my first draft. If I keep working at it, the words eventually shrink.

But I’m not yet prepared to stipulate browser fungibility.

All nodes link to Chrome.

However, in the ongoing matter of Want v. Need, the two parties will stipulate the following: what we don’t want, and what we certainly don’t need, are any more vapid mouth-breathers clogging our sidewalks and stairways while thumbing obliviously on their hand-held “smart” devices.

Forget the iWhatever, what I really need is a device that I’ll use less.

What exactly is the attraction of the word “stipulate”?

Here’s a doozy from a technical article I wrote years ago.

You will understand the negative implications of dual interfaces much more clearly at the precise moment that you attempt to return a reference to an object’s non-default interface when calling from a late-bound client across apartment boundaries.

Tame Visual Basic with IDL

Put. Down. The. Thesaurus.

A Little Allotment of Alliteration is Actually A Lot

Number two on the hit list has to be sequences of words that sound alike.

Were I from the East, yesterday would’ve been my Oriental-Oriented Orienteering Orientation …but I’m not, and unfortunately, “Occidental-oriented” is an ornamented accident.

Raptor Ravages Radio Reception — Reminiscent of Rodent-wreaked Resistor Ruin

How is any of that necessary?

Maybe it’s Possible that There Are Some Less Than Completely Assertive Statements

I must eliminate “I think”, “it seems”, and “likely” from my vocabulary. Out timid statements! Begone!

Cromulent Cultural References

I tend to slip in obscure references to pop culture far too often. For example, here’s a reference to the Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk episode of The Simpsons:

Of course, Chrome is not all smiles und sunshine.

All nodes link to Chrome.

You’d have to undertake many years of Simpsons-study to spot that one.

Inconsistents Verb Tensed

This is something I do all the time, but I can’t find any examples of it because I’m completely blind to inconsistent verb tenses: past, present, and future all combined in the same paragraph. I’ve probably made the same mistake in this very paragraph.

I did!

Inventobobulous Wordnikerry

Here’s a good one. I invented at least one word and used another that belongs to, and should be left in, the nineteenth century:

So, when faced with five-hundred pages of verbiose flapdoodle, I look for any procrastiphilic diversion at my disposal.

A spoon full of programming makes the medicine go down.

I wonder if I misspelled “verbose” or instead invented a concatenation of “verbose” and “grandiose.”

Just how far can you take this sort of thing?

Duplicloreproittosynchroordinopysimilefuseplication

Answer: too far.

And Starting Sentences with Conjunctions

At some point in grade school, we learn the rule that you mustn’t start a sentence with “but” or “and.” Later on, we learn that the rule can occasionally be broken for effect. The key word is “occasionally,” as I seem to do it all the time.

Freewheeling, yet Rule-bound: Punctuation!

I checked the database. Fully 101 of my 180 blog postings contain semicolons, and 103 include dashes.

I think my over-use of punctuation stems from my computer programmer training, a discipline that scatters punctuation marks like droplets in a hurricane.

Emotional Cowardice

I thought about leaving this section out, but that would’ve just made the point all the more emphatically. Despite having written much about myself on this blog, little of it reveals my inner thoughts and feelings. Heck, I used a five-word bullet point to announce my wedding, and that was a couple of weeks after the fact. You can’t be a good writer unless you’re willing to write honestly about your experiences and emotions.

* * *

So there we have it. A starting point on the path to better writing. Now that I’ve recognized many of my faults, I have hope that I can correct them. That last one will be the most difficult to conquer.

And don’t succumb to the urge to point out the many errors that I’ve made in this posting. I’m not a better writer yet.

While true, there are at least two caveats that must be observed of my bold statement:

• My prediction might not come to pass.
• As of last week, pretty much everyone else has predicted the same. Well, at least someone else did.

Whoops! Looks like the spotting scope is mounted crooked again.

To my way of thinking, there are two things wrong with social networking as it exists today:

1. The control over my privacy is delegated to multiple third parties, all of which financially benefit from the elimination of my privacy.
2. My contributions to the multiple social services are scattered, and can’t be reconstituted into a single stream of expression.

Facebook is the exemplar of the first point. Much has been made of Facebook’s recent changes to their privacy policy, as well as the — seemingly intentional — complexity of the site’s privacy settings. The more personal information that Facebook can expose, the more it can be exploited for advertising profit. To counter this exploitation, tools to monitor and restrict Facebook’s myriad settings have appeared, and Quit Facebook Day has been organized for the 31st of the month.

I haven’t seen my second point discussed, but it goes something like this: if I tweet a couple of somethings, write something on a friend’s wall, discuss something in a blog comment, post a picture of me doing something, or send an e-mail with something in the subject line, there’s no way to tie all of those together, even if they all share the same something. Instead of forming my complete opinion on the topic of this something, the fragmented ideas are segregated: into Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Flickr, and Google Mail, respectively.

A diagram of the current state of the social network, like the following, would look much, much better if designed by professionals.

Marilyn and Elvis popped pills, and Sherlock shot up regularly, so what was Harry's vice? Bertie Bott's peyote-flavour beans?

For something called a social network, the people don’t actually socialize directly with each other, and the intermediaries have far too much control over the method and content of the social interactions.

As a solution to the problem, I predict the following:

The future social network is one in which everyone hosts all of their own information themselves, uses external services merely as aggregating proxies, and is bound together by an open networking protocol, in the spirit of HTTP.

Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to make that any simpler. So here it is again:

1. All of the information that you previously shared as tweets, comments, discussions, blog posts, e-mails, chats, and so on, is now stored in a single location of your choosing, and under your control.
2. Services like Facebook and Twitter still exist and allow you to connect with others and share your information, but only by using transient references to the information that you host.
3. A networking protocol, specifically designed for sharing social information, binds everything together.

So the — unprofessionally executed — diagram of the future state of the social network now appears thus:

Just imagine that ring of retweets.

The people are all directly connected, but the familiar and easy-to-use (‽) services still play a role in making and maintaining the social interactions. In the example above, Elvis is writing on Harry’s wall. Facebook makes the connection and provides the interface for typing on someone’s wall, but the content of Elvis’s posting is hosted by Elvis, and completely under his control. If the message is sensitive, and intended only for Harry, Elvis can forbid access to it from anyone else. Because Facebook does not store the posting, Elvis may also revoke it at any time. Because Elvis stores all of his own content, he may also combine it together in any way that he sees fit.

Ta da!

I have blithely skated past many implementation details, but there are nevertheless at least two projects underway to implement my (ahem) prediction: Diaspora and OneSocialWeb. The former collected a barrowful of cash donations following Facebook’s latest privacy indiscretion, but the latter is further along in development and employs just the sort of open social protocol I had hoped for: XMPP.

Facebook and the others won’t willingly surrender their control, but the short history of the web already tells many stories of users hopscotching past intransigent services and companies. I predict the same in this instance.

(Diagram icons courtesy of Iconka and jwloh.)

On election day, never, ever, wear anything but a solid-colour tie.

From left: Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Still, I’d take any one of them over Harper.

I was clearing out some receipts earlier today and found this.

Adjusting for inflation, my withdrawal could've financed the second Boer War.

At the time, I do remember thinking that the Automatronic Currency Disburserator was an older model:

"Your $1.50 service charge will help defray the cost of my gilding."

The question is: is this the “one more,” or is the “one more” yet to come?

…but I’m not, and unfortunately, “Occidental-oriented” is an ornamented accident.

Put much more simply, Carole and I took the Yukon Orienteering Association‘s “Learn to ‘O’ Clinic” yesterday, ostensibly so that we could devote even more of our time to being lost in the woods.

The day was spent learning to read the highly-detailed orienteering topographical maps, and then scrambling about out back of the College with said maps. Learning to find bearings with the compass was also helpful, but at our level the maps are far more useful.

The YOA holds meets every second Wednesday, and we’re planning to attempt the more casual routes: the ones with fewer crossed contour lines, and with controls (checkpoints) conveniently located near trails.

The forecast that greeted me this morning:

...and an atmospheric pressure of 33888241107 dynes per square fathom.

So, the temperature is just above freezing, but the wind is blowing at some unknown Roman legionary speed.

It’s things like this that cause spaceships to crash.