{"id":729,"date":"2002-02-23T09:06:27","date_gmt":"2002-02-23T14:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/?p=729"},"modified":"2018-12-29T20:46:17","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T02:46:17","slug":"acknowledging-craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/writing\/acknowledging-craft\/","title":{"rendered":"Acknowledging Craft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.alistapart.com\/articles\/writebetter\/\">Dennis A. Mahoney lays down some guidelines<\/a> for improving the quality of writing on weblogs. Turns out that writing for the web isn&#8217;t that different than writing for other media. Be focused. Be concrete. Delete. Delete. Delete.\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"cont\">\nMany weblog writers do not write as a creative act. They auto-write; they record their thoughts as unconsciously as possible in a journal to which they&#8217;ve given the whole world the key. This rambling self-expression is such a fixture of weblog writing that waferbaby.com has created a program that generates random teen weblog babbling.\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"cont\">\nCompare Virginia Woolf&#8217;s journals to her novels. Turning experiences recorded in a journal into a work of fiction or into an essay is hard work. The main task is to take what is told and transform it with language that shows, rather than tells.\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"cont\">\nWriting is both art and craft. Like any craft, writing requires knowledge and practice. Lot&#8217;s of people don&#8217;t want to make the effort to learn the craft. Now that anyone can self-publish on the internet, the only motivation to learn how to write is a desire to better express oneself. In writing, more than any other form of self-expression, perfecting one&#8217;s craft is looked on with suspicion, as something that limits self-expression rather than expands it.\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"cont\">\nAn alternative point of view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why is perfecting one&#8217;s craft is looked on with suspicion, as something that limits self-expression rather than expands it? <\/p>\n<div class=\"belowpost\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/writing\/acknowledging-craft\/\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[323],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2584,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions\/2584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}