Well. Another typical "why do I blog" essay. Boring.

We've both seen a lot of them. Herman Martinus blogs because it provides him with "mental offload and catharsis," as writing things down frees him from overthinking. Alexander Irpan blogs because "he doesn't have a personal site" and he wants to "practice writing." Lilian Weng blogs because she tries to "document her learning notes". My friend Zixuan Zhang blogs to simply record his "thoughts and experiences."

You can tell how many sites I've "stalked" when I'm creating mine. A sincere sorry. And you may expect that I'll offer a completely different motivation than those above to present a dramatic twist. But I'm not. Another sincere sorry.

My motivation to blog is a mixture and extension of their motivations. "Practice writing" undoubtedly occupies a large portion, though it's a different kind of "practice" which I'll explain now. As a perfectionist and an "orthodox grammarian," I've been lured into the vortex of fine-tuning wordings, phrasings, rhetorics, and grammar. Just now, I spent minutes debating whether to substitute "motivation" with a synonym because it has appeared thrice, and whether a more complex word shall replace "things" (please check whether you were actually annoyed by these).

Also, I've found that focusing on grammar too much will create lots of commas in a paragraph. You shall add a comma between two independent clauses. You shall add a comma after an introductory clause. You shall add commas to separate a parenthetical clause. Check out the brief example below:

Yes, I, who loves interstellar travels, am immersed in a bottle of soda, one that's actively spewing, a bottle of curiosity, and hence, I may know a lot of things.

It's an exaggerated example, but being too meticulous in g-r-a-m-m-a-r-s and c-o-m-m-a-s induces lots of visual pressures and makes word recognition less fluent (though I'm a serious fan of the Oxford comma as it makes a list look more balanced). So I want to practice challenging this habit. (Note in "orthodox grammar" you shall not use sentence-initial coordinating conjunctions. How strange).

Therefore, the motivation of "practice writing" shall be narrowed to "experiment with the style of writing that I want to grow into." Hence the first thing I'll do before typing a single word in any of my blogs is to quit Grammarly. It's not the correct way to write. You may argue. I agree, but we all know that "correctness" is undefined. A style of writing is correct if it best serves the writing piece's purpose. The core purpose of these blogs (apart from the purpose of me writing these blogs) is to share my ideas and ideologies to create impact, and therefore such a "de-grammarly," smooth, and conversational style makes reading and persuading easier, because it flows better.

In terms of creating impact, the distribution of ideas and ideologies is the most efficient way of doing so. Impact emerges when, first, one reads my essay and decides to embody my idea. Second, one remembers (part of) my essay and at some later instant they realize my idea speaks exactly to their situation and exclaim "here's a perspective I can try." And third, one chooses to debate my idea, which helps sort out their idea. In general, an essay that develops an idea creates an impact if it mobilizes the reader to act or think further in ways rooted in that idea.

Back to my motivation of writing these blogs. Writing also makes the logic clear. There is a reason why grammar exists though I somewhat dismissed it above. Consider:

(A) They destroyed the planets which accepted the lemonade tax.
(B) They destroyed the planets, which accepted the lemonade tax.

A simple comma can create diverging semantics in writing. Sentence (A) means only the planets that accepted the tax were destroyed, whereas (B) states that all the planets were destroyed—and they had accepted the tax. Thus, writing down forces an author to tweak their expression's semantic precision, when they have to stare at their words and make their thoughts clear.

Such an organized and granular logic is pivotal for introspection. I envision that my blogs will cover a lot of psychoanalysis, with essays like "Why do I photograph?" This process of tearing away each layer of camouflage and facing one's deepest (and probably most savage) desires is painful; it also prompts one to bluntly confront their past experiences, positive or negative. Crafting psychoanalysis as blogs forces the brain not to escape from the pain and shame but to form a coherent, layer-by-layer examination. Knowing what I am doing and why I am doing so is essential to deciding what I shall do next. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said.

BTW, I'll try to keep up with the commenting and upvoting (and absolutely downvoting) features. But this site is made with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, so it may take some time.