In the past year or so I can’t help but feel that my writing quality and consistency has fallen off steeper than the Sirius-XM stock.
I’ve been on Twitter since the the summer of 2006 and Tumblr the fall of 2007 and have been using them as my primary means of expressing thoughts and opinions rather than the traditional long-form blog posts I’ve traditionally written here and that helped shape my writing through college.
During the heyday of blogging, I posted hundreds of articles on carpeaqua, MacZealots and a local blog I curated called It’s Evansville. Twitter makes it easy for me to express the nut of what would be a full blog post or column in in a matter of seconds instead of investing half a morning writing 500-1000 words on the subject.
Tumblr has led me to focus on reblogging other people’s content, adding a sentence (if anything) and moving on to the next thing. In the days of Trackbacks, I’d highlight a portion of of a blog post or article I was interested in and then expound a rebuttal. For a while I tried to use this Tumblr as my primary blog, but I felt that the few times I actually felt like writing anything substantial it was lost amongst my postings of audio and video clips.
I still write one substantial piece of content each week for the Evansville Courier & Press, but it’s such a limited scope that it feels like a chore most weeks. Sometimes it is because I am not feeling particularly inspired to write about anything I’ve followed in the tech sector in the past week, but many times it is because I find myself struggling to write 500 words on a topic when I know I could say the same thing in a sentence or two as a tweet.
I’m not sure if this is an actual real world problem or just something I’ve made up in my head to justify my perceived skills decline, but at least it forced me to write a few more paragraphs than normal.