Your Heart in It

Lately I've been doing a lot of reading on the internet; one of the main reasons that I do so is so that I can find interesting articles to share with you.  But the other reason that I try to read so much is so that I can try to understand what is considered good writing--and what isn't.

I often find myself frustrated with a lot of the news articles or blogging articles that I read--articles that are given views not because they are good articles, but because people are more than willing to overlook the mistakes hoping that they'll gain something useful by doing so.

In my mind, I have this idea of a golden era where writing used to be valued, and people that had good ideas--and conveyed them well--were more widely respected than others.  These days, however, the more I read, the more I find spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, broken phrases, leading ideas, and biases that I feel are ruining the way that people view, not just news, but everything--from hobby articles to entertainment spotlights.

It's as if it's become more important to get something "out there" as quickly as possible rather than taking the time to analyze the information, consider its relevance and importance, and then to contextualize it so that when people read what you have to say, they are getting a full picture instead of a splash-spectrum view of "a day on this planet Earth".

And the truth of the matter is that I feel like short-changing people denigrates the art of writing as a whole.  It makes the words almost as irrelevant as the ideas they are meant to convey.  It cheapens the experience; it makes -me- feel like the writer doesn't even care enough about their own ideas to actually spend the time and energy to make it worth my time to read it.

Now, I could blame that on technology.  I could blame it on a "need it now" culture.  And as I've seen, there's been a lot of that this week--people trying to remind us to pull our heads out of our collective media behinds and look up.  But I think what they're really trying to remind us is that it takes something more to build a relationship--with the world, with others, and, dare I say it, with communicating ideas.  And that is important--for all of us.

So I will make a promise:

I will strive to always write with respect--to you, to the ideas I am writing about, and to the people who seek to create something with their work instead of just giving us a moment of their time.  I will try to be honest with my thoughts and feelings, and I will try to look to the future of what I am writing about as well as considering its past.

I can't promise that I will be perfect, but when I write, I will put my heart into it.  And when I post something here, it will be because this is a labor of love--not of convenience or something contrived so that I can say "I did my blog today".

And I hope that even when you're having one of those days where everything just seems to be against you that you can battle through it, one little moment at a time, so that you can put your heart into the things that you love and that mean something to you, as well.  But most of all, I hope that you'll do everything with all your heart--realizing that if you can do that, then you are not only giving those around you the best that you can give them, but you are also an example to them of how the world should really be.