I am not a good writer, but I learned this

Posted September 26th, 2013 at 7:59 pm by Matt

I don’t think I’m a great writer. When I finish writing I usually don’t have the patience to go back to proofread. Once I’m done writing, I am done. Ready to move on to something else. It’s been this way since grade school and I am, for certain, a creature of habit.

I do, however, enjoy learning new words. Like up at the top of this blog: “précis.” It pretty much means summary – and more importantly for my site – it starts with a “p.” I’m always trying to expand my vocabulary and those sorts of things.

Anyway, when I talked recently about building a personal brand, I realized that building the brand that is “Matt Chepeleff” is more important. After all, part of my brand is a 6.4 out of 10 ranking as a writer – and that’s fine with me.

I did recently learn, however, one bit of knowledge from the world of writing that had always confused me. It’s driven me nuts actually – because I’ve seen both variations in books and online. The problem: which one of the following is correct? Option 1: “An apple, a carrot and a pear.” Or option 2: “An apple, a carrot, and a pear.” Again, I’ve seen both. Turns out it is option two that is correct – and that last comma is called the Oxford comma. Who knew? Not me.

Perhaps I’d embrace writing more if the rules were clearer and made more sense. Like with coding, you can’t really leave much room for interpretation of the rules. I like that.

I must confess that I stumbled upon this fun fact which watching Glove and Boots videos on YouTube – they are fantastic and you should watch them (especially the video about Hipsters). If I had set out to find the answer to this I would probably have stumbled through some funny search terms for a while. Who knew all you needed to do was set out to watch puppets on YouTube.