This time I got it right.
One of the more obvious differences between the Boidem and my blog is the language.
The Boidem is in English, while my blog is in Hebrew. As much as I might like
to write that my Hebrew writing comes to me as easily as my English writing,
the truth is that after living considerably more than half of my life in Hebrew,
English still flows much more readily, even naturally, with me. Actually, it's
not only a case of the natural flow of the language, but of an unavoidable self-consciousness
which I suppose I'll never overcome in Hebrew.
The link to this page from the referring page is on the word length - a
word which for some inexplicable reason I seem to perennially misspell, putting
the h before the t, instead of in the opposite, proper order. I
catch this mistake when I copyread my columns - ordinarily by copying and pasting
them into Word where my spell checker lets me know what I've misspelled. But even
if I miss a word here or there (or don't catch that h before the t)
I'm confident that few if any readers are going to think that I don't know how
to spell in English. The same goes for my often rather awkward syntax - readers
may feel that I haven't done as thorough a job of editing as I should have, or
(when they're in a more lenient mood) that I purposefully construct my sentences
in a rather roundabout manner. But they'll rarely think that I don't know the
language.
On the other hand, in my Hebrew writing, fluent as it may be, I've always got
the lingering feeling that someone is reading over my shoulder, waiting to catch
me in a glaring error of spelling or of some unacceptable sentence structure.
Thus, although it's often quite acceptable to find spelling and syntax mistakes
in blog writing (a function of blogging being a medium that goes from thought
to print almost instantaneously, and often without review) I force myself to reread
everything I write before posting so that I don't get caught, and identified,
as someone who actually doesn't know the language.
Go to: In one tenth the time