I’m down to the anonymous questions and the questions that seem to call for full-post responses on my “Riddle Me This!” post. I would highly suggest following every single one of the lovely folk who passed a riddle my way, even if it’s just to connect with them because they are all, obviously, wondrously active commentors who participate and contribute to the blogosphere!
Question from Dreaminofobx:
Your blog posts always read like I imagine you would sound if we were sitting face to face over a cup of tea–friendly, relaxed, conversational, natural. Does that voice just automatically come through when you sit down to draft a post, or do you have to revise and reword before you hit the “publish” button?
Related Daily Post prompt:
How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?
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Sometimes I write things that don’t make any sense, and I’ll often tell a story that could have been told in half as many words. If you were to make a list of the nouns used in my posts, you’d notice the terrible limitations of my chosen written vocabulary.
But through all my writing flaws, you can usually hear me.
My voice is strong. It always has been.
I remember being young and asking my older sister to support a fabricated-story about how Mom’s dictionary ended up with a sharpie mark on the front cover. She did her job as a big sister and convincingly reported the lie, exactly as I had told her.
Every single adult in the room listened carefully, and then immediately and simultaneously turned their head to look at me.
Despite my innocent facial expression and my sister’s excellent recital of my story– they could hear the Rara behind the lie.
That’s voice for you.
Over the years, I’ve worked on it– spending my writing energy on improving the area where I have a bit of natural talent, rather than the areas where I struggle.
I studied punctuation until I found the perfect methods of pacing my words so that a normal reader would echo my voice inside their head. I overuse commas because I overemphasize pauses in my speech. I love the m-dash– no punctuation better suits my ability to start at A and end at Z with nary a stopover at Q.
I’m a believer in the Oxford comma. I think vocabulary in writing is often overrated.
I’m not afraid to start a sentence with a “but”, or end it with a preposition, if it helps me make a little more sense.
Not that I’m not afraid to not make sense. Sometimes even life doesn’t make sense.
Does that make sense?
Yes, I thought so.
I write in the way I’d speak to you, except slower.
(I speak pretty quickly in real life.)
So yes, voice is definitely my biggest strength, and yes, if we were having tea, I’d sound very much the same. No, I don’t really edit — except for the removal of the word “get” and the subtracting of excessive exclamation marks.*
(Just because I’m excitable doesn’t mean you have to be.)
I prioritize voice because it seems to communicate my intent more accurately than a well-chosen word, or a well-framed sentence.
Not that those things aren’t important– they just aren’t the most important things to me.
If I was required to edit before I published a post, or tweeted a tweet, or posted a status, or sent an email, I wouldn’t waste my time fixing the grammar.
I’d focus on concision– because looking back at this post 500 some words later, I think I could have said it in 20.
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You can ask anything you want, too– the Riddle Me This post is still open for questions.
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What’s your biggest writing strength? No hemming or hawing now… I want outright boasting. If you have examples you can link to, even better.
* As an after-note, I actually do edit– links and missing words in my bottom questions quite often. I don’t think I ever really noticed that before! 
