# Brian writes about overusing "I" - the nominative case personal pronoun:
"If most of the sentences in a post begin with "I," there's a problem. If most of the posts on a blog have that issue, well then why read the damn thing?"
Several years ago I realised that I drastically underused it.
Instead of writing from my own perspective I would always say we, a royal we but partly projected out to readers, almost as if I was afraid to talk from my own experience or point of view, uncertain about my own ideas or not willing to stand up and be counted.
This is a personal blog so there should be a good degree of I, me and mine - I make no apologies for that. Still, there has to be balance; it can't read like a primary school child's "what I did in the summer holidays" assignment.
Being personal it is unavoidable, even expected, that there will be plenty of I's and that personality is, in my opinion, exactly what makes a blog worth reading. I want to know what the author thinks, feels and believes. I want to hear about, and get to know, them and imagine this is why people might read mine.
On this day does it's job and brings to light posts that I was proud of back in the day. I suppose I still am. Yet I look back at some of those great pronouncements and can't help but laugh at their arrogance. I was writing as though only I could chart the new course towards mainstream social media adoption and how the big players could improve on their offerings; using we instead of I, writing my own responses and reactions but superimposing them on the world at large. Some of it was good, I don't think it's too conceited to say so, some of it was prescient with ideas eventually becoming a wider reality, albeit due to being a natural progression rather than because I wrote them somewhere on the internet. I'm definitely not that conceited. Still, I look back on a lot of it before March 2016 and think it is so irrelevant - that's why it's all in an archive. It's from a different time when my thoughts and priorities were completely unaligned from where they are now. I've occasionally wondered about scrapping that part of the blog completely, or maybe farming it off to a subdomain - I've been there before with closing my social profiles. Regardless of whether or not it aligns with who I am now it is part of my history, part of what got me along the first stages of this journey. Those old posts are what helped me find my voice - although I have since had to rediscover it much like an adolescent going through puberty when they no longer sound like themselves. I've moved on and what I write has done so accordingly.