Atrophy

I haven’t written a daily blog post in a long time; in fact, I have not been doing much writing at all over the past couple of months. I obviously expected my writing skills to decline, but the reality of it didn’t hit until recently when I needed to revise a paper I was submitting. This reminds me that writing, like all skills, is like a muscle. Now that I have neglected my writing muscle, it has atrophied.

Of course, all of the writing habits I instilled earlier this year have still paid off, and I am a better writer today than I was before I started writing daily posts. At the same time, I am considerably worse off than I was two months ago since I stopped writing consistently. Honestly, the scarier thought is losing my ability to think clearly. I have found good writing and clear thinking to be strongly correlated, and I really cannot tolerate losing the latter. And so with this post I will hopefully restart my writing habit.