> Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Are the books gaining popularity again? What are your thoughts?
One of the downsides of blogging is that bloggers very often do not have editors. I think just about every substack I see that isn't maintained by a seasoned writer or journalist tends to veer towards being far too wordy and meandering. People don't naturally understand how to maintain a reader's interest and remain sharply focused on the thesis of their piece. That's a skill that needs a lot of honing, and even great writers have a lot of trouble keeping things tight without a good editor to help.
There are a lot of posts people make where the central premise is good and I'm interested to see what they're saying about it, but the journey to get there is too long, involves examples and metaphors that add more confusion than clarity, belabors points that don't need belaboring, involves unnecessary digressions into tangential topics that would have best been saved to develop into a separate piece, and a number of other writing sins. Freelance blog-post editors should be more common.
One of the downsides of blogging is that bloggers very often do not have editors. I think just about every substack I see that isn't maintained by a seasoned writer or journalist tends to veer towards being far too wordy and meandering. People don't naturally understand how to maintain a reader's interest and remain sharply focused on the thesis of their piece. That's a skill that needs a lot of honing, and even great writers have a lot of trouble keeping things tight without a good editor to help.
There are a lot of posts people make where the central premise is good and I'm interested to see what they're saying about it, but the journey to get there is too long, involves examples and metaphors that add more confusion than clarity, belabors points that don't need belaboring, involves unnecessary digressions into tangential topics that would have best been saved to develop into a separate piece, and a number of other writing sins. Freelance blog-post editors should be more common.