I have a friend who is an excellent software engineer, and he has a very similar philosophy to his coding. Get something down and then fix it and improve it.
He also says something along the lines of "if you look back on something you wrote a year later, and you don't feel compelled to change it, you haven't learned/thought/grown enough".
+1 about the need for rewriting. There's a really good quote about that:
“There is no such thing as good writing,
only good rewriting.”
— Robert Graves
Unfortunately most of the writing we tend to do in the day-to-day is throwaway one-off stuff like emails, which are not worth polishing that much. As soon as you have a 1+ audience though, and especially for marketing and webcopy, investing the time to cleanup the message becomes super worth it.
Among the rules for good writing should also be, don't use four thousand semicolons to weld your entire essay into a heaving sea of words which offers the reader not even the life ring of a majuscule here and there.
In the days when dictionaries were not yet omnipresent, I heeded complaints about the breadth of my lexicon. Now, when the meaning of every word in the world is nigh instantaneously knowable from every Internet-connected device including the one you used to fuss about "farrago", I no longer worry about it. Congratulations! You learned a new word today.
I think the point is that the 3rd paragraph is one sentence with 35 semicolons. Generally, a sentence should hold one or two ideas, but this one is a mixture of a lot of ideas. Hence, one might call it a farrago.
Personally, I think I'm OK with this use, as it's supposed to be a kind of list after the colon. Isn't the proper use of semicolons somewhat subjective, anyways?
Done to this awful extent, it's not just a stylistic choice but a UX error. Human brains optimized for reading initially recognize words and phrases based in part on their shape, and orthographic conventions like initial majuscules and bullet lists evolved to facilitate that recognition in support of legibility.
Abusing semicolons in this way is, in the most strictly pedantic sense, not syntactically incorrect inasmuch as a semicolon joins independent clauses. But that's like saying you can use a flathead screwdriver in place of a cold chisel. Sure, if you hammer on it hard enough for long enough, you can eventually muddle through, as long as you don't mind making an unserviceable mess of the work. But it's still the wrong tool - just as are thirty-five semicolons here.
Syntactically permissible or not, this usage is nonetheless an error, not because it is stylistically grotesque - although it is also that - but because it actively impairs legibility rather than promoting it.
I know what that word means, but only because it appeared in Asimov's "The Stars, Like Dust", which I finished two days ago. I didn't know what it meant, and had to look it up.
The semicolons did not hinder my reading experience, they just changed the voice and pace of it. I certainly prefer an overabundance of semicolons to an overabundance of commas, and more still to an overabundance of full-stops that makes me feel like I'm reading some soulless middle-school essay.
HOWEVER I also strongly maintain that if something can be best expressed in a bullet list, do that. I feel that would have made reading this essay easier.
