The biggest single problem with blogs as a medium for writing is the very thing that bloggers tend to love them for: the lack of editors. It’s naive to imagine that you can just sit down at the keyboard, shoot from the hip, and hit the target unaided every time. There is no writer who doesn’t benefit from good editing, and it doesn’t matter how long you have been writing. Anyone who has worked on a longer text for publication knows how much work it takes on both sides to produce something fit to print. Some of this effort has to do with larger issues of content and the development of a strong argument; some of it with the details of copyediting.

It seems obvious that when an untrained intermediary is handling copy by an amateur writer, the results are unlikely to be sparkling. Designers are quick to reject amateurishness within design; exactly the same considerations should apply to editing and writing. These are crafts that need to be learned, ideally from working with professionals. Output that falls short of basic standards is no more satisfactory or persuasive than clumsily matched typefaces, botched kerning, or trite design formulas used as though they had just been invented.