September 04, 2004
Influence of Writing on Speech
I'm terrible at writing or typing. Not so much that I can't do it, I just think everything out way too much. Takes me years to get a couple of paragraphs out! Well, not quite, but let's just say that my average post takes me 45 min. to an hour to write. Almost three hours on my long posts. And while inebriated, I have no idea. (Oh, to those that may think I blog drunk most of the time, not true. Although, it has been brought to my attention that the difference between my sober and influenced posts is very noticable! No idea if that's a good or bad thing!) I can tell you that the only time I post drunk is when I'm not sober!
Ok, I drifted a bit. Part of the reason it takes so damn long to write, is that I'm alway's thinking ahead. Sometimes my hands can't keep up with my thoughts, so I try to be very deliberate with what I'm thinking. If I don't, I end up skipping words, sentences, and, a couple of times now, whole paragraphs! One thing that I do alot of, is, when writing or typing, I will think punctuation. Example would be from the previous sentence: One thing that I do alot of (comma) is (comma)..... Do any of you do that? (say, yes, please!) I don't know when I started doing that, but I've been doing it for many moons now.
Why tell you all that? To tell you about a near slipup earlier this week. With little sleep, I had been sending out e-mails to a couple of friends that I haven't been in touch with for awhile. I was screwing them up quite a bit, but I finally finished. Almost late leaving for work, but I got them out! Anyway, once I got to work, one of my co-workers says, "Hi," to me, and I say, "Hey (com...) uh, what's going on?" I couldn't believe that I actually started to say "comma!" I just broke up laughing! Well, I got laughing so much about it, that I almost did it again when one of my friends came up. However, I caught myself way before actually saying it. So I went to Grau and told him about what I almost done, and then asked him if he had ever done that. The look he gave me before laughing and assuring me that, "No, that's probably just you," was funny as hell! I asked one other, before I decided to stop humiliating myself, and got the same look and laugh! Only the second person tried to give me a hard time about it. So I started talking to him like that: "So (comma) how (apostrophe) s it going (question mark)" He just looked at me, smiled, and said, "you're good at that!" I told him, "That's because it's how I write everything!"
Am I the only one? I doubt it, but there may not be many who do it. Do you?
