I'm Starting a Blog

I had my year-end performance review with my boss yesterday, and we were discussing areas that I need to work on. A familiar weakness of mine came up yet again -- my writing. I consider myself to have a reasonably good command of the English language, but my writing output -- especially the writing that my boss ever sees -- is generally shitty. 

My writing limitations are even more acutely obvious around performance review time, because I'm expected to prepare a "brag sheet" of the work accomplishments I made since the last review. I usually know about the deadline for this brag sheet weeks in advance, but I still end up doing the entire thing in an hour or two immediately before I send it in. I don't get a chance to even read it over before sending, so it's always filled with typos, bad sentence construction, and a lack of flow that comes from copying and pasting snippets from previous reviews. 

The act of writing gives me anxiety for some reason. My daily to-do list has had "work on brag sheet" as item #1 for weeks now. I had an empty brag sheet template open on my work computer every day, but chose to work on more menial tasks I had on my list. This happens every time I have a writing assignment, whether it's for work or it's an important e-mail I need to send to my family. It's happening right now as I write this blog post.

So when my boss suggested I search out writing workshops or sign up for an on-line writing class, I laughed a little under my breath. My writing problem is almost entirely psychological. Sitting through a class where I learn about the importance of having an introduction paragraph with a thesis statement isn't going to help. There will be assignments, I'll wait until the last minute, my writing will suck because of that, and I'll be stuck in the same place.

If my problem is psychological, then this blog will be my "therapy". I need to get to the point where the act of writing no longer scares me, and I figure that forcing myself to write something on a regular basis will help me get past that. Practice makes perfect, right? I still haven't figured out what that something will be, but I'll get to that later...