Write by design

While standing in the shower the other day, I came to realize why my writing is so awful. I remember that my mum was so often distracted by what she was currently doing that she would forget a task that she had started earlier - and it seemed that hardly a week would go by without her burning some part of the dinner because she had become involved in another task while leaving dinner to simmer. Have you ever noticed that when a pan of peas boils dry, it leaves all the peas standing apart? I used to believe that she was simply forgetful, now I understand that it was not a case of forgetting but that she used her mind so intensely on her current task that it excluded memory calls to other tasks. So, standing there with the water pouring down my body I was able to forget whatever else I was working on and let my subconcious have access to some current resources - and there it was! When I write I focus on what I am writing about, and if I want the text to be readable then I need to do a separate edit job on it.

Here is an example of a sentence I added to someone else's article on uncyclopedia; grammar has to run hard to keep up and often trips up while tracking the undulations of my thoughts when I write. Try reading it aloud to yourself and feel how I have just banged a series of concepts together in a line:

"XXX is the kind of profitable organization that would undoubtedly bring you great pleasure to invest in, and may even turn you a profit if making money on investments is your game."

After editing my own work, I can still feel the concatenation of phrases spraying across the page like a highly focussed fire hose. It's a brutal style, but my way of handling my essentially minimalist nature. Here is another example, this time from one of my own entries on uncyclopedia and after I have edited it down to something that could almost be read by a human:

"The earliest that is known about this ancient village, for want of extensive archaeological research beyond that undertaken by Bob Perkins in the garden of 3 Church Lane during the potato harvest, is that it formed one end of the defensive line for the fair people of Kent against the foreign Romans."

After several years of trying to teach other people how to write in a foriegn language, I began to notice some typical patterns in how they created sentences. One of these I call the 'phrase drift', and it seems clear to me that people often write by concentrating on the phrase they are writing now with a vague idea of where they want to go, and are incredibly strongly influenced by the most recent phrase they have written. It is a bit like those games where you say a word, and then someone else says the first word that they think of based on your word. As the sentence creeps forward, phrase by phrase, it drifts away from the course the author originally plotted to take the words to their destination by the end of the sentence. At some point the phrase-trail peters out and the author suddenly becomes aware of by how far they missed their destination and inserts a final phrase to get back on course. Rewriting the sentence rarely seems to be an option, and a similar process also takes place on a paragraph and text level, often destroying the essential sense of the piece.