The Polish Rating

Creating posts can be difficult. While there is usually no lack of topics, I have trouble sitting down and spending serious time on the writing process. What I do write often takes forever to finally be posted, because I never feel like it’s perfect. I want to push myself to post more often for a few reasons.

First, posting more often will help build a habit of posting. I think blog posts are extremely valuable, and I want to do it more. It’s a way to collect my ideas around a subject, preserve them, and make them available for other to read and critique. Writing provides a way to get my ideas out and save them for the future. They provide a record of my opinions and views around a topic from the time I wrote it. I can also look back and reference what I’ve written, giving me a better starting point for thinking and writing about new ideas.

With more technical topics, posts can help people better understand a topic and create a dialog between the reader and me the writer. It is extremely satisfying to have someone reach out to you about an old post and have interesting opinions and questions to share. The posts then provide value beyond the post itself, which is important to me.

Depending on the post, I will spend more or less time working on it. If I’m extremely interested in the subject matter, I’ll spend a long time editing and tweaking a post until I’m happy with it, but not all posts are the same. Sometimes, I just want to get ideas out of my head. This makes the posts more like streams of consciousness, rather than a well-reasoned, well-thought out academic-like paper.

While I don’t want every post to be that way, allowing myself to create the quicker, lower quality posts should get more things posted. Just getting ideas out there is what is important, and I can always go back and improve posts after their initial posting.

To help make myself more comfortable, I’ll be adding a “Polish Rating” value to posts. It will guage how polished I think the post is on a scale from 1-10, 1 being an outline or broken sentences and 10 being a fully complete post on the level of an academic paper. This will help set the expectations of myself and readers of what to expect from the article.

As such, I rate this post…

Polish Rating: 4