Before NaBloPoMo started, Jeremy and I were talking about the difference between blogging and other online publishing. He said that while he might not blog every day, he certainly publishes just about every day, either by Twittering, Flickring, del.icio.us-ing, Powncing…

I could probably say the same thing (I’m at least Twittering just about every day, if nothing else) and until this month, I’ve kind of used that to mitigate the guilt I’ve felt at not updating WordRidden very often. After all, at least I’ve been putting something out there, right?

But these two weeks of daily blogging have really hammered home the difference between the type of short-form publishing encouraged by most “social media” sites and the type of blogging I tend to do. In other words, it’s one thing to write “drinking a latte” on Twitter; it’s quite another to put together a cohesive piece of written work with a beginning, a middle, an end—and a point. I’ve really fallen out of the habit of doing that, and it’s rather worrying, because it’s a skill that, like any other, will atrophy if it’s not used.

Maybe the fact that I now spend all day writing as part of my job has made me less inclined to write here for fun (kind of like I largely stopped reading for pleasure in college because I had so many things to read for classes). But in my job, the focus of my writing is on choosing the right words and structuring sentences in a pleasing manner. It’s not up to me to structure a whole text, to form arguments—or indeed, to come up with something to write about in the first place. Translation is about writing, but it’s not necessarily about composition, at least not on a large scale.

So it’s been interesting to have my composition skills put to the test on a regular basis again. The NaBloPoMo exercise has also reminded me of why I started blogging in the first place: because I like to write. When I started my site, I had about two readers—Jeremy and my mom—and I was quite happy with it that way, because I wasn’t really writing for anyone but myself. My site wasn’t about simply maintaining an online presence, because back in 2000 there was really no reason for me to want to do so. I wasn’t part of the same online community that I feel I’m part of today.

But these days, being online is as much about keeping in (ambient) contact with people as it is about having an outlet for my thoughts. So maintaining an online presence seems to have taken precedence over personal expression for me, which is kind of odd, seeing as how I’m not the type to talk just for the sake of making noise, if you know what I mean. Anyway, through NaBloPoMo, I’m rediscovering the joy of blathering on at length about whatever comes to my mind. I just hope that when the month ends and I’m no longer working towards a specific goal (i.e., blogging every single day for one month), I’ll be able to keep up the stream of blather—er, I mean, the frequent, in-depth pieces of writing exploring my innermost thoughts.