posted 2007/02/20 at 18:35
In my spare time these past couple of weeks I've been moving older pages of the .org over to the new design. For most of the pages this just involves adding a few bits of HTML to get the background image to display behind the title of the page, but for some older pages I never bothered moving them over from the first design of the .org, and moving them to the new design takes much more effort. On the plus side, once those pages are moved over then not only will future redesigns of the Website be much easier to implement, but I'll finally be able to say that the .org is 100% coded by hand. (The original "Twisted Mystic" version of the .org was composed in FrontPage.)
Looking at these older pages as I redesign them, it's hard not to be struck by my writing style back then. I wonder what my composition students would think if they saw the grammar I used to use back when I was just starting out here. Back then I actually would overlook some rules of grammar on purpose, because I think one of the things that has always been a clear mark of my style of writing is the conversational tone I use. (I attribute this to the authors I read as a child.) If you ever get the chance, record a short conversation with one of your friends and then transcribe it; it's interesting to analyze the grammatical structures you use when you write versus the structures you use when you speak. I think one of the main reasons I was able to do so well in my English studies was because I learned to adapt that conversational tone to the demands of academia, moving my grammar more into line with Standard American English while still keeping my sentences free-flowing and uncluttered by the steel-vice diction that tends to plague so much academic work. Certainly I've used this style more and more on the .org as the years have gone on here.
Still, there was a time when I was not quite as eloquent writing on here as I would have liked. In addition to that, someone pointed out to me recently how ineloquently I expressed some of my ideas in my earlier writings here. I've given a lot of thought to that, and I think that what happened was that going to Antioch for a year got me started on the "untamed passion" phase that most young adults go through, where your political ideas are strong but the passion with which you feel your beliefs often clouds your ability to make a coherent and cohesive argument. Most people grow out of that phase fast enough, but I think what happened to me was that leaving college and going to work for my father for all those years kind of kept me in that state for a long time. Once I went back to college at UT, I think I was finally able to grow out of that phase and move on to a more eloquent style of expressing my political views. I don't think I have become as good at that as I could be, but it is something that I continue to work at here.
That being said, it is hard to avoid the temptation to go back through those old writings of mine and "fix" them to reflect where I am in my life at this moment. However, I think it's important for me to keep those writings up there, not only to remind myself of where I've come from but also for everyone else to see where I was at in those earlier stages in my life. Six years from now I'm sure I could look back on the things I've been writing over the past month or so and find lots of stuff I could "correct" if I wanted to, but I can't let myself worry about that. It's better for me to keep the history going than to try to change it.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon