Quality and Accountability

I showed this blog to my parents the other day.  Roleplaying runs in the family; they used to play in the 80's, and my father game-mastered frequently.  My parents are educated, much more so than I, and I welcome their input.  I was surprised when they informed me of my many errors, mostly grammatical.  My mother said, "Your father said that if he had taught you in school, you would not make those errors."

This got me thinking about the state of American education, my literary work, and even Star Trek.  I attended public school for all but a half-year of my grade-school life, like many in the United States.  I was always ahead of my class, despite my recollection in elementary school of my mother telling me I had a minor reading disability (which she now has no memory of, typically, but there it is).  When I went to college for my Associate's Degree, my two semesters of Freshman Composition were so painfully easy that I don't remember a dang thing about them, except one overly and intrusively Democratic instructor and that I got a 4.0 in both classes (though some can argue that the courses were not to par with that of a university, and they would probably be right).  Despite this, my parent's saw enough errors in my posts to comment on, although I'm sure one error would have sufficed.



I enjoy writing.  More-so, I want to write for a living.  I'm also the guy that likes to point out grammatical errors I find in reviews and news articles.  Our society has become less literary, and I find myself in the same category.  In the words of an android on a quest to be more human, "I aspire, sir, to be better than I am."  Its the one message of Star Trek that we should take away: in order to reach new heights (ie the stars), mankind must seek to better itself.  I just got finished re-watching an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Borderland, in which Dr. Arik Soong repeatedly declares that humanity has room for improvement.  In the episode, of course, he is referring to genetic manipulation, and it is considered a dangerous subject.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that I want to be a better writer, for the sake of being better.  I know this blog is young, and may never be seen by anyone outside of my circle, but I open this door for my readers.  From here on out, the quality of my work shall be held accountable by any who read it.  If you notice an error, please point it out however you can.  The best way is to leave a comment, however I'm debating on creating a Twitter account for this purpose.  I will cross-reference your correction, and if it is indeed a correction, I shall amend my posts to remedy it.  This way, I will provide the best work I can of the given topic, and I hope to learn and improve as I go about correcting.

This declaration includes this post, so have at it.  Fortunately, modern technology has a quick spell-check, so I'm in the clear there, unless I were to use "their" where I had just typed "there."