Last week I had to accept that I cannot type well.

This isn’t to say that I cannot write, or that I fail to follow rules of grammar.  Check out the first paragraph of this post.  I wrote that I type “well,” which is correct, instead of “good,” which is incorrect.  I even used “cannot,” which is more acceptable than “can not.”  I am confident in my ability to put words together.

But when it comes to applying these rules of grammar onto the page, I am all thumbs.

I began drafting my yearly self-evaluation for work.  The evaluation is supposed to reference the Professional Growth Plan (PGP) that each faculty member has on file, so I decided to look review the PGP that I wrote back in October.  It’s a relatively concise document: seven pages of goals that I will shoot for in the next three years in an effort to get tenured someday.  It gets read by my director, the Provost, and the tenure-and-promotion committee.

When I looked it over last week, I found that I had made eleven errors on it.  Eleven.  The document that is supposed to start building a case for my tenure has “a/an” agreement problems, errant words, and a reference to a section of the PGP (“see the section about video projects above for more details”) that doesn’t exist.  If I were a student in one of my classes, I would have lost two letter grades on a paper because of these errors.

How am I supposed to present myself as a serious, detailed scholar when I produce a document that reads like an ENG 101 thesis?

A couple days later I was asked to produce a five-minute video for my church’s Christmas Eve service.  It was a quick job consisting of one still image, a Phillip Glass soundtrack, and about twenty graphic slides.  Total number of spelling errors: four.  I misspelled “forgotten,” “experience” (twice), and “nativity.”

So, I must admit to myself that I am a less-than-acceptable typist, and I that cannot trust myself to produce a document free of errors.  I must be disciplined enough to have my work copy-edited by others before I share it with any sort of serious audience.

And I must be okay with that.

In other news:

• My weight remained static at 185.5 pounds for nine days.  I thought that the scale might be broken, so I intentionally overate one night to see if the scale would notice.  It did, and now I’m at 186.5.  In hindsight, overeating as a means to test my scale was not a good idea.
• I’m spending much of this week in the company of family and friends, so my writing time is competing with visiting time.  As such, I only have one writing goal this week: to complete a draft of the self-evaluation noted above by the end of the day Saturday.
• If I’m lucky, I’ll see big-ass fish this week.