Over at Cup O' Books I saw mention of Michael Saffran's Speaking Out article on blog writing and, well, Seth was much more polite than I'm going to be.

Mr. Saffran notes that many bloggers don't pay particularly close attention to the quality of their writing. Gracious me and mine! Call the grammar police! Run-on sentences and dangling participles are running amok on the internets!

Now. To be fair, he does have a point, but it is a mind-numbingly obvious point. If you care to have your writing taken seriously, then put some effort into writing well. Okay, fair enough. So but in addition, Mr Saffran has taken pains to coin a new term for blogging that fits his criteria for quality writing: "wrogging" (as if "blogging" wasn't bad enough).¹

He claims to be "perplexed when some blogging is equated with writing." I don't know, I read blogs and I see all these letters grouped into words which are, you know, strung together to form things that look like sentences that express the ideas and thoughts of the author. It looks pretty much like writing to me. Thing is, you can take his article and substitute "emails," "letters," "interdepartmental memos," or even "newspaper essays" where he has used "blogs" and the point is equally valid. Good writing is good writing. Bad writing is bad writing.

I don't know which bugs me more: that the D&C wasted ink and paper printing such claptrap or that I have wasted the past 15 minutes (and consequently, your precious time, provided that you've read this far) responding to it.

For once, I'm glad I didn't bother to proofread...