I remember back in high school and my under-graduation days (when I last ‘studied’ English as a language) I used to wonder what the point of actually ‘understanding’ the various layers of interpretation of the various classic tales such as Macbeth and various other Shakespearean plays was. Back then, none of these stories made for interesting reading and I was more into mainstream young adult fiction such as the staple fare of Enid Blyton, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Three Investigators and later on Alistair MacLean and the like.
But despite having this aversion to the classics, I still managed to retain a decent vocabulary and managed to write decent essays and longish answers using my quick wit and more than decent ‘command’ on the written word. In fact, I can safely say that I am sure that my answers and writing in general was in the top 5 percentile of my school. But back then I didn’t quite realize that they were the stepping stones to something bigger and very dear to my heart, writing.
I don’t distinctly remember when but I guess it had to do with the fact that my initial few blog posts when I started the blog garnered quite a few comments and regular readers. Funnily enough the audience was not necessarily the intended one, but nevertheless the more I wrote in those days, the more I gathered confidence in my words. As the post count kept increasing, so did my confidence in its stature.
Despite the fact that I suffer from a reasonably severe case of low self-esteem, more so when it comes to putting up my writing in the public domain such as this blog, I have realized that the only way I can get better at this is by doing exactly that. By publishing blog posts on as many topics under the sun I can and soliciting feedback from people who know what they are talking about, I can safely say that my ability to present my ideas with more clarity, brevity, panache and the occasional flourish has improved by leaps and bounds in 2014. Thanks to three of my close friends who read almost all my blog posts. Am not mentioning them here, but they know who they are.
That being said, I will be the first person to say that I have miles to go before I can confidently say that I am a ‘good writer’ in every sense of the term. And until such a point, I solemnly promise myself to keep trying to improve with each and every post of mine.
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This post has been written for Project 365: A post a day where the intention is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was to answer the question as to whether I was good at what I do and what I would like to be better at. I chose my writing as the topic to write a post for this prompt.
