From an interview with Clay Shirky over at the Barnes and Noble Review:
I’ve always adopted the Bill Burroughs mantra, which is, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Which is to say that if there is any intrinsic value in writing or expressing yourself or taking a photo, it’s worth doing even if the results are mediocre. Whenever the production maw has opened more widely, whether it’s cheap photography or it’s weblogs, the average quality falls. The average quality of a piece of writing is now lower because the denominator has exploded. The question becomes how do you find the good stuff in this much larger group. I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed. What’s interesting now is that the old gatekeepers for identifying, anointing, and promoting talent are different in this generation than they were previously.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
I don't think writing is taken as seriously because we now have so many ways to get information out there and editors aren't always as reverent (for want of a better word) about going through each writer's sentences. There is a push to get information onto the internet quickly and magazines are under tremendous financial pressure and many are going under.
Because information may have to get posted hastily, here is a recent sentence from the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper that I don't always read or like but which I thought tried to produce sentences with correct grammar: “”Others note that because this technique is so new, not much regulation exists, and therefore there is likely to be many court challenges.”
Maybe I'm totally off base but none of my teachers would have called that sentence grammatically correct. You can see the original article as noted below.
2nd page, second or third page from the bottom. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2010/0708/…
My theory is that in the haste to publish the latest info, no editor looked closely at this one.
Your comment reminds me of a blog post I *just* read on an IBM study showing that well-edited material can boost response by 30%. I believe it.
More here:
http://writingfordigital.com/2010/07/04/a-fourt…