On numerous occasions and in several posts, I have sought to explain my status as a rookie among a field of genuine writers.  I wandered in here one day… and I stayed.   I read a great deal, but other than proposal writing, customer project reports, developing sales and marketing collateral and some internal user guides, I've never considered myself a writer.  I haven’t had the training and I could probably drown in the grammatical rules that dictate the written English language.  

Then there is the placement of commas.  Those are the most damnable little things. I recall rationalizing a while back that the best guidance to use in the placement of a comma was to read the sentence aloud, and where I needed to inhale… that would determine where I placed the comma.   This resulted in more than a few run-on sentences and some fairly incomprehensible writing. 

I was thrilled to finally partner with Microsoft Word, who lovingly underlined misspelled words in red and underlined most grammatical faux pas in green.   With such a partnership, I could actually convince myself that I knew what I was doing.  

Then, I recently invited a friend here in the Open Salon to read some old posts of mine.  What I received was not only positive reinforcement, but some sincerely appreciated constructive feedback.  I learned that I allowed instances of “purple prose” in at least one piece that was reviewed, using unnecessarily elaborate or flowery words.   I was also shown where I was guilty of “head hopping” in another story.

I was thrilled.  This was a professional critique of my stuff by someone whose work I respect.  The party in question liked my writing overall… but here was something concrete that I could work on.  I admit to being a bit of a perfectionist about some things.  I intend to improve my writing skills if I am going to keep doing this.

Now if I only understood what “head hopping” and “purple prose” really means!

So I looked it up.  It was easy to find on the Internet, along with numerous examples of bad writing.  I also found a great deal of material relative to Point of View.  A lot of this I’d figured out on my own, but apparently I’d missed some things.   Clearly this is Basic Writing 101 for most of you, but it’s a course I never took.  I’ve been getting along with my undergraduate bachelor’s degree, Microsoft Word, and a fairly creative imagination.  

Investigating Purple Prose was actually entertaining.  The picture used at the top of this post was taken from a web site where people are having a great deal of fun with an expanded version of the concept.  

Nevertheless, I can do better. 

Right now I am not sure if I will repost revised versions of some of my earlier work, or simply focus on personal improvement from this point forward.  In either case, it’s a start.  I am grateful to my friend for pointing me in the right direction and more than appreciative of more constructive feedback on future work going forward.