If you don’t have an editor or aren’t rewriting your prose, you may indeed be communicating faster and clearer than most people—but not at the level the author talks about. Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption.
> Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption.
For mass consumption, sure. But the best writers almost never wrote for mass consumption. Some of them did acquire a mass following, but it usually was not a goal; their goal was to communicate the ideas they developed to a potentially interested audience. Ads and dark patterns are their enemies, they distract readers from ideas the writer wants to convey.
The last few decades saw a meteoric rise of blogs and other forms of writing. A small portion created something new, but the vast majority were regurgitating old ideas in a (slightly) new light or peddling outrage. I will not cry if 90% of those writers stop writing. This will also increase chances that whoever is still writing does so because he has ideas to capture, not because he optimizes for money and is happy to push ads or ideas based on today's ROI. My 2c.
You misunderstand me: I agree that lazy SEO spammers are poor writers. My beef is with the GP's dismissal of writing slower than the speed of thought—when the best writers pore over these things more, not less. Quoting Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize winner in Literature: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
I did not read it this way. I read that post as arguing that fast writing is neither particularly important (which is what I read to be the main point) nor that hard (which, I think is what you focused on).
