Member-only story
How Reading Your Old Posts Makes You a Better Writer
Or Why It’s Okay to Hate Your Old Posts
As you may have noticed, I’ve been inactive in this space for quite some time now, but today I finally decided to revisit this profile that I had previously spent so much time and effort building. I thought reading some of my old posts was a good way to start, and I have to tell you, it was kind of painful.
I was shocked by some of the analysis and the conclusions I drew, which were kind of simplistic or downright illogical. Some paragraphs were hard to read, not always because they were explaining a complicated subject but more often because they were just not that well-written. And then there are the grammar and spelling mistakes, often too embarrassing to mention.
To be clear, this isn’t just a self-deprecating exercise where I aimlessly reflect on how bad of a writer I am, on the contrary, this exercise led me to realize something much more positive, because after painfully reading through most of my old posts, once the cringe had passed, I came to a very simple but very significant realization: the fact that I notice these errors in my past work means that I’ve progressed as a writer; it means that I’ve improved at least a little bit in all of these different areas that a competent writer should develop. This doesn’t mean that my…
