Is Our Quality Threshold Too Low?

With the rapid spread and easy accessibility of blogging sites and magazine sites, the world has gained a plethora of new article writers writing articles on countless subjects every day. There has been a wonderful opening up of a market which was previously only properly available to professional or free-lance content writers who would need a decent CV and portfolio of recent work to get a writing job with a website, magazine or newspaper. It was either that or you needed the technical skills to build and maintain your own website, and a little know how in marketing it.

Now anyone with even a limited typing ability can create articles and get them published, allowing their creativity to be seen by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. There are even a variety of mechanisms to make a little money from it too, Triond being a key example of this.

Browsing sites like Triond’s group of publishing sites I have read a mass of articles covering an impressive range of topics. I have read articles which turned out to be fascinating even though they cover a topic in which I have little interest. I am sure that many of even the best articles would never have been published if it were not for recent developments in blogging and magazine websites.

The problem with such accessibility is that the quality threshold always seems to drop. For every excellent article I read there are several good ones. For each good one there are many not-so-good ones and, sadly, there are also some which simply should not have been published. We’ve all seen a few of them: the ones where the author appears to know little about his or her chosen subject and has clearly not bothered to do any research, or the ones where it has been thrown together with little or no proofreading. Sometimes the topics are inane and simply not worthy of an article. Other times authors just throw together a couple of paragraphs about a subject which is currently popular but about which they know nothing and have no interest, creating it simply to make some money because it is popular.

Let us all hope that out of the sea of mediocre writing some truly excellent authors arise who would not otherwise have found an audience and developed their skills. I know it is not nice to discourage people but, at the other end of the scale, there are some writers who are clearly not cut out for writing for an audience, and if it was not for blog and magazine sites they would not have even tried in the first place.

To be an effective writer you need to understand what you are writing about and have the ability to see it through the eyes of your reader. I believe that to be truly good you need to be able to predict what will be going through the reader’s mind as they read each sentence. Not everybody can do that. The Internet has made writing a much more accessible calling, but the old system definitely kept the average quality of what material was published was substantially higher.