20190128.0430

Coming up on a month into the new year and my avowed attempt to try to get two consecutive calendar years of daily posts made, I cannot help but notice that my readership seems to be down--and not only here, but also in the other webspace I maintain. I had expected it in the latter; much of my readership there comes from students enrolled in my classes, since I post sample assignments and accounts of classroom activities in the webspace, and I'm teaching fewer students in my current session than I did in my previous couple of them. But I already had smaller reader-numbers here than I might like, given the amount of time I do spend putting pieces together here, so seeing those numbers fall a bit further is not a happy thing for me, and I have to wonder what it was that I did to make it happen. I need to avoid it in the future.
It's not an uncommon thing, of course. I often wonder what I could have done better than I did. Sometimes, it's even valuable wondering. Such was the case not long ago, when, as I drafted one of the aforementioned sample assignments, I was obliged to review and revise a piece of writing I had done for the same class earlier. The changes I made were relatively minor, largely consisting of making my phrasing more concise, but they seemed to have some effect. The piece I had written dropped a grade-level, as assessed by the Flesch-Kincaid scale (and I know there are issues with that scale, but it is a convenient means to assess the writing being done, and it is reasonably accessible to a reasonably large number of people, so it has some utility). Since the class for which I am writing in the present session is at the level it is, the shift in reading level is actually a helpful thing--and for other readers yet, it might serve as a useful indicator that even small corrections make large differences.
For me, however, there is always a danger even in such ruminations. I know myself well enough to know that sober assessment quickly becomes self-flagellation. Instead of examining my past performance for ways to improve, I find myself castigating myself for my errors out of either a sadistic or masochistic impulse that quickly drives me into episodes that might be called depressive but have never received formal diagnosis. They do prove vexatious to people close to me, however, and I have to wonder if I have revealed such a thing in an earlier post to drive others away. Or I want to, but I know I ought not, lest I start myself into a cycle that will not bode well for what I would write or do or be in days to come.
I already have enough trouble finding things that people want to see me write. Clearly. I do not want to make matters worse if I can avoid doing so.