Every once in awhile – not often – I get a message complaining about typos or grammar. The heartbreaking ones are from the retired English teachers, they are sweet and very civil but they are crushed when they see dangling participles, run on sentences or spelling errors. I have a nasty psychologist who sends me jeering e-mails about typos, she insists she has a full and meaningful life, she calls the people who like my writing “mindless groupies.”
I get messages from one or two from men who call me “dude” and complain that I need a proofreader. I think they are proofreaders.

It’s interesting that these messages are so few and far between – grammar is not held in the regard it used to be and most people slide right over my errors. I believe in transparency, though, and every now and then I like to explain my policy on grammar, typos and language.

When I started the blog in 2007, I made some major decisions about it, some of them prescient. I reasoned that most writers blogs were simply commercial tools to sell books, they weren’t creative entities in themselves.  I decided mine would be an honest and open blog about my life, it might or might not sell books, but the blog  itself would become valuable and important. I think this was, so, it took a long time and a lot of work – and photos – but I am proud of it.

Most of the writers I knew failed to produce successful blogs, and the reasons, I  decided, were that they spent an hour or two correcting them for every hour they spent writing on them. They simply couldn’t present words and thoughts to the world that were not perfect, and either there was little on their blogs, or posts so infrequent people drifted away from them. They got so wrapped up in proofreading they couldn’t write.  I also thought the polished writing on many of those blogs was stiff. I had the sense lots of the people writing them disliked blogs, they refused to send anything out into the word that was not perfect in every way. And all of the public interaction made them uncomfortable.

Writers have always worked and written alone.

I ought to say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I was never good at grammar, spelling or punctuation. I gave my teachers fits, even those that thought I was a good writer. But beyond that, I decided my blog would be more successful and relevant if I spent more time writing than correcting and proofreading. That was a good decision. Because there is almost always fresh content on the blog, it has grown steadily – about four million visits a year. It has become as valuable and central as my books, in fact, my blog is my book.

I post frequently, four or five times a day sometimes, and if I paused to thoroughly proofread and check for typos and grammar, I would get little published. Many people want blogs, but they think about them as an interruption in their real work.  And lots of creative people were and are snobby about blogs, they think they are beneath them. I have come to see that my blog is my real work.

It also may sound strange, but I want the blog to be real and authentic, many of my posts are done out of events as soon as they occur, and I don’t want them to seem polished or smoothed over. Like the blog itself, they are meant to reflect real life, and the new and kinetic energy of the online world.

The new writing is informal, direct, sometimes challenging. I am at home in it. It is sometimes good, sometimes ordinary, sometimes bad. But it is me.

I have never equated good writing with good grammar, I think the two have little to do with one another.  For me, good writing is about narrative and emotion. I am a story-teller.  I do have a grammar program, but it takes awhile to get to it and review the changes and re-post it. I would rather spend my time writing.

I review most pieces two or three times after they are published, and by the time I am done, I catch many of the typos myself. Often, those changes are not re-posted to Facebook, where many people now see my blog.

So that’s my typo policy. I apologize to those of you who get upset by it, but it’s not going to change. I’d much rather write and take photos than correct the things I have written.