T w e n t y S i d e d
My topic for the column this week is nicely summed up by the title, which is I guess what titles are supposed to do. So that’s nice.
Here is a conundrum for people who write columns for a living:
When is it okay to repeat yourself? It would obviously be completely unreasonable to publish the same column every week with the same points, only slightly re-worded. But if you write a column on some problem or issue and (say) six years later the problem is the same (or worse) then surely it would be okay to run it again, right? Some people will have forgotten. Heck, six years is long enough for a generation of kids to progress from middle school to graduation, which moves them from the “I want Mario for Christmas!” to “Shit, I’m broke. Where do I spend my very limited gaming dollars?” demographic, which turns them into potentially new readers who didn’t care what I had to say about survival horror back in 2009.
I worry about stuff like this. I want to keep things fresh and interesting, while at the same time making sure the Important Stuff”Important” being an extremely relative measure, here. gets said. Where is the line? Could I do this topic every year? Biennially? Leap years? Harmonic convergences? Wednesdays?
How much do I need to re-word things? What if I really nailed the wording the first time? Do I need to re-arrange the sentences to make them less optimal just for the sake of avoiding copy & paste writing? What if I just happen to word things the same because the sentences are still coming from the same brain with the same writing habits?
I dunno. Nobody has ever complained, but it’s the sort of thing I worry about anyway.
