on corrections

The astute reader will notice that many of my posts will change slightly or radically as I revise them-- catching typos, adding or deleting information, and cleaning up the style. Some of this may stem from pride: I'm an inveterate retroactive proofreader, and I'd like to provide the reader with easily digestible prose. But these corrections are also done out of a sense of necessity: readability facilitates communication, and I'm all about clear communication.

Some people approach their blogs as if they were diaries. By this reasoning, everything written on the blog is sacrosanct, and thus untouchable, once the writer has hit "send" or "publish." I understand and appreciate this; such writers feel it is unscrupulous to alter the past, even if that means letting mistakes lie.

But in my case, the blog is not meant to be a diary in the strict sense; I see myself simply as trying to convey information to readers, doing so as correctly as possible. By my reckoning, I would be remiss if I didn't go back and redress any errors or stylistic flukes.

So: my apologies to people who might be doing a double-take when they come back to a given blog entry an hour later and find that it has changed, but I hope those people will now understand why such changes have occurred and will continue to occur.


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