As I'm sure you've noticed from my posts, I'm not the best writer. I know I'm not terrible but I bet an English teacher could go to town on my posts with a red marker. So I'm going to take a moment to explain/apologize for some of my writing tendencies.
For starters, I'm a rambler. I feel like even the smallest details are imperative to a story and can't be left out. I apologize for this but just know that whatever you're reading was once longer and much harder to follow. I do my best to keep it short and sweet (or let's say not too long and ridiculous). I think I get this from my mother, who takes at least 20 minutes to tell any story, even the simplest one. More elaborate tales can take her hours, if not days, to complete. In addition to thinking every detail is important, I am also a scatterbrain. Any given aspect of a story can send me into another, completely different anecdote. I'll start off talking about an epic play I made in softball, the next thing you know I'm outlining the steps needed to be taken to help stimulate Atlantic City's economy in my opinion. I blame this partly on my mom again, who is also a scatterbrain but aren't all women? Mostly I blame drugs and alcohol. I believe they are responsible for the death and destruction of many brain cells that could have helped me concentrate on one topic at a time. If you're saying to yourself, "Well you're the one who decided to ingest those drugs and alcohol." then I'd say "Fuck you. I was peer pressured." And if you had the audacity to challenge that I'd scream, "SHUT UP!!!" and run home to the loving arms of my bong and crack open a beer to chase the shot of vodka and valium I just took. Just kidding (or am I?).
Which brings me to my next tendency: I love parenthesis. I use them alot. They're a great way to sneak in a funny one-liner or to clarify what I'm really saying without interrupting the flow too much. I want to use them a lot more than I actually do but I try to exercise some restraint. Again I love using them and will not apologize for doing so.
I use informal words and phrases a lot. This is a direct result of the demise of the English language. I know this has been going on for quite some time but I believe it has gotten increasingly worse over the last 10 years or so. I first noted it in the 90's when people started using antonyms of words as synonyms (ie. something that was "bad" could mean good, something "sick" could be awesome, etc). Then came the "izzle" phenomenon. I'm still not sure how that works. Nowadays I feel that everything is abbreviated. This has to be a result of the rise of technology, mainly text messaging and instant messaging. There are countless examples of this and I like it for the most part, even though I usually have no idea what these abbreviations mean when I first see them. However you will not see me do that on here too much without an explanation. Mainly you'll see me use words like "gonna" or "wanna". I'm a big fan of "Ima" instead of "I'm going to". I'll probably correct most of this during the proofreading process but if some things slip by me, I hope you squares can forgive me.
I seem to have some problems with tense, quotations and run-on sentences. Tense is kind of a big deal. I'll be telling a story in the past tense and suddenly change to present tense. Or vice versa. Sometimes in mid-sentence. I try to fix this after proofreading but I don't even notice it most of the time. I hope you don't either or can just power through my dimwittedness. I don't think quotations are a big deal. I get the point across with or without them. I just wish I could use them correctly all the time. I suspect that I will get better at using them the more I write (did you catch that stellar quotation above? Fun, right? And this is only my 3rd post). My run-on sentences are almost always corrected during the proofreading process but sometimes I miss them and they are long & fantastic. I hope you get to experience some of them.
If you see any other kind of grammar mistake, feel free to leave a comment and chastise me mercilessly for my dumb errors. It's the only way I'll learn.
Perhaps the main reason for these deficiencies is because during my 12 years at Catholic school, I only had to write two or three serious papers (5+ pages). Most of the papers I had to write were only 2-3 pages and they were few and far between. When I did have to write one, I'd just give it to my parents to proofread and fix all the retarded grammar mistakes. They would usually end up just writing a whole new paper for me and I would look like a genius when it came time for my teacher to grade it. I was devastated when I got to college and found out I had to write papers all the time. It forced me to make smart, nerdy friends and search the internet for non-porn material (which was infuriating). Sometime between my first year and graduation I got not terrible at writing but since graduation I've lost the majority of my mediocre writing skills. So that is the gist of why I stink at writing. Wow. That explanation was only supposed to be a paragraph and look how long this entry is. See? Rambler.
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