Re: Death knell for quality content?

[Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>]

Will Sansbury wrote:

>
> Poor quality writing forces the reader to disengage from the
> message of the writing to figure out if they misread or if the writer
> blundered. Anything that forces the reader to step away from the message,
> even briefly, represents a communication failure.
> 

I think that some bad writers do manage to bind their meaning to their 
less-formal communication patterns--it may make my eyes stutter and my 
mind falter to read, but it can succeed in getting sophisticated 
technical messages across. In many cases, for someone to try and convert 
such bad writing to good writing is to seriously overestimate the 
importance of good writing.

I'm not trying to be a heretic about the value of good writing, but 
since I have already probably stepped in it by endorsing some bad 
writing, I'll try to finish the thought:

Sometimes it seems that the absence of good writing is taken as a sign 
that the information is bullsh*t free. IOW, good writing can mean that a 
writer/filter has come between the information source and the receiver, 
resulting in prescriptively good writing, but at the cost of 
information and accuracy that was mysteriously integrated with the 
original bad writing.

If you think back far enough, I'd be surprised if you or anyone in tech 
writing hasn't been scorched by a SME for inadvertently changing some 
crucial meaning while trying to dress up some awkwardly written source 
material. For sure, I know about smouldering tail feathers (my own) at 
that level, and that is one reason why I qualify the idea of 'good 
writing' this way.

YMMV.

Ned BEdinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com

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