Seriously, though, there are a couple of things going on here. First, there’s a differnce between bad writing and bad typing. Typos do not make writing bad. Does 600 years of textual error introduced by decidedly mediocre copyists make Chaucer a bad writer? Does the awful quarto edition of Hamlet make Shakespeare lousy? Of course we could argue that in these cases the error isn’t the authors, but they make the pbasic point: good writing has little to do with pucntuation, and less to do with spelling. Hell, English spelling has only been standardized, insofar as it is standardized, for 150 years.

I know you’ve probably seen photocopies of Joyce’s and Proust’s manuscripts. You want to talk about some correlation between good writing and good typing or penmanship? Ha!

Tony’s whole essay becomes a joke when he gives the New Yorker as a an example of a place to go to experience good writing. Does he really thing the stories in the New Yorker were any better than the average blog post when the authors handed them to the copyeditors? Let me say that again: Ha!

Blogs are quick, off-the-cuff, the internet’s verzion of open mic night. People who can’t handle that should stay off line.

If Tony wants his favorite bloggers to be as polished as his favorite columnists, he should offer to hire them editors. Personally, I go to blogs for speed, and if someone’s going to tell me about a security hole in my OS of choice, I’d rather they didn’t take the time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, thank you very much.