To my imagined readers

I began this weekday blogging experiment  back in January as a way to share ideas about writing with any of my college students who might find time to check in. There was no way to know who actually read anything and that means my daily blogging was really for me.

Just as the CDC stating that fully vaccinated people could dispense with masks and social distancing (with some exceptions) gave permission for the many unvaccinated people to also dispense with masks -- after all, there are no good ways to check and no penalties for refusing or just not participating -- it is also the case that once a teacher makes something optional, with no grading repercussions, the tendency is for students to NOT keep something like reading a blog on the to-do list.

BTW: the above is quite a lengthy sentence, complete with two parentheticals and an introductory dependent clause as well as a meandering independent clause. I don't think there are any clear errors in that extraordinarily long sentence, but most readers will find that sort of compound-complex sentence a challenge.

Some will simply stop at some point. Some may not even start it. But it accurately reflects the way my thinking works -- I am a fan of the parenthetical, and I wanted to connect a recent event with a more general observation about teaching and grading.

If my prime audience is me, then there is no issue with that overloaded sentence. For other audiences? Time to edit and rethink.

The point of this post is that I decided early on that I would press on with the blog. Even though the spring semester has ended, the blog will carry on.

I find it amazing that this is post #80. I'm not sure how many total words I have compiled, but I would estimate that I have averaged about 300 words per post, and that amounts to 24,000 total words.

Most modern novels weigh in between 60,000 and 100,000 words, by way of comparison. 

A favorite writing teacher named Donald Murray, who died in 2006, always said, "Nulla dies sine linea," which is a quote in Latin from Horace. It means, "Never a day without a line." 

We become better writers the way we become better at most things: regular practice. 

There is a good chance that this blog will approach nearly 100,000 words in 2021. How about that?