Good writing

— There’s been a lot of exceptionally crappy writing in the Blogosphere lately, so I’m going to do my little bit toward improving the quality of expression by reminding my peers of one simple little principle that will help you make your musings more palatable to others: keep it brief. Sound ideas don’t need 1000 … Continue reading “Good writing”

— There’s been a lot of exceptionally crappy writing in the Blogosphere lately, so I’m going to do my little bit toward improving the quality of expression by reminding my peers of one simple little principle that will help you make your musings more palatable to others: keep it brief.

Sound ideas don’t need 1000 words to say what 100 say just as well; crappy ideas can’t hide behind lush undergrowth of indirection and irrelevent detail, and extremely stupid ideas couched in terms that waste the reader’s time don’t endear you to anybody.


Follow the example of the professional writers — there’s a reason they get paid for doing this stuff and you pay to do it.

13 thoughts on “Good writing”

  1. I disagree.

    Writers write.
    Editors edit.

    Too many so-called editors these days are really just paperpushers or managers in disguise. Amazing how mistakes or slop falls all the way down the chain until it’s ready for publishing and the printers/coders/webmonkeys get blamed for errors making it to the readers’ eyes, not those who are supposed to catch the slop.

    When the job is filled by an MBA instead of a Masters of English, you know you have a problem. Sure, a writer can self-edit, but I’d put my chips on a writer-editor team before a self-editing writer any day of the week. *shrug*

  2. I was talking about bad writing in the Blogosphere, where a number of people, both in the Blogistan realm of war blogism and the Blogtopia realm of Pollyanna tech blogism, seem to be afflicted with Bloggorrhea lately. We used to be better at self-editing.

  3. My editor is my tiny attention span. I can write on something only so long before I get too bored to continue. (I will admit, however, that my blog is not exactly an example of my best writing.)

  5. Richard,

    By criticizing a blog for its quality and content, aren’t you condemning the blog movement itself? I know that you’ve had a blog for much longer than most, but it’s an elitist view to think that weblogs should be thought out and written as if they were written by professionals, which is what the tone of your message incurs. It has been my understanding that blogging was something that can be done by anyone, and there are indeed people that just keep personal journals, and then there are others, like ourselves, that get involved with political and technical issues.

    By the way, sorry for the length of my reply. I understand that you like things to be stated in fewer words.

  6. I write, therefore I live..
    T’is the long-windedness of my life I thusly choose to obfuscate upon the soggy gills of fellow bloggers…
    Oh grizzled abbott of omphalos, why dost thine nose drip so exquisitely and in such poetic a fashion..
    of mortal phelgm..?

  7. All Richard is saying is keep it short when you can, and police your writing for punctuation, spelling and grammar. Is that too much to ask?

    Suman, you’re a madman.

  10. I figure a lot of amateur writers blog because they want to become better writers. In the interest of moving that ambition along, I’m suggesting that one measure of good writing is economy of expression.

    In the recent bikini debates, there are three active participants with some good points who insisted on hiding them behind a dense thicket of irrelevancies. You could summarize their essays like this:

    Blogger 1: Young chicks in bikinis are hot.
    Blogger 2: Those chicks are somebody’s daughter, you perv.
    Blogger 3: I like chicks with big, real tits, and anyone who doesn’t is a perv.

    So if that’s all you have to say, why waste 1000 words on it? I dunno, but I guess it beats shooting speed. In any case, I’m glad that people can talk about this subject again, since it was off-limits during the Dark Ages of Political Correctness.

  11. Actually, economy of words is one of the first things they tell you in J-school. I now remember hearing having that drilled into me. So I guess it’s good to hear it again, even after having been out of college for nine years. Yesterday was just a bad day. Apologies for the snappy reply.

  12. “Getting paid for it,” while nice, is never a guarantee that what’s being paid for is actually any good. While it is generally true that shorter is better, it’s not always the case.

    Great writers know when to write 100 words and when to write 1000. The rest of us muddle through, following a few popular rules to cover our lack of skill, all the while waiting for someone to be desperate enough to send a little green our way.

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