Carelessness

I've been noticing a distressing amount of small errors in my writing lately. Rereading my blog posts and my emails, I too often find that I've left out words or endings, lost track of my parentheses and appositions, or written "you're" instead of "your", or "their" instead of "they're". Not to mention the spelling mistakes and typos—too many of them. Obviously I'm not proofreading carefully enough, but I also feel like I'm writing with less care than usual. Truth be told, I'm not writing proper, disciplined paragraphs often enough and this is having a predictable effect on my prose. I'm getting out of shape. The standard (minimum six-sentence, maximum two-hundred-word) paragraph, written in 27-minutes, trains your ability to "care" about your writing. Writing blog posts all (what Kurt Vonnegut called) "higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum,", by contrast, and often more than 500 words, straining at the half-hour time limit, adding words until I run out of time, has left my sentences undisciplined and imprecise. This paragraph, as you may have already guessed, is the beginning of a new regimen.