I saw poorly written blogs

Context
One of the e-mail lists I’m on pointed me in the direction of the Learngasm blog, which includes this entry. The 100 links on it looked interesting so I thought it would take me forever to go through all of them, but that turned out to not be the case. Most of them were poorly written, so I rejected them as wasting my time.

Commentary
There is almost no content in the world that I will wade through poor writing to get at. Living in the 21st century, I find there’s usually enough good writing available on any subject that I can afford to filter this way, so I feel blessed.

So what counts as poor writing? Well, it's similar to poor teaching, which I define this way: any educational experience that is more strongly focused on the teaching than on the learning is of poor quality. My hope is that you’ve never had this happen, but I’ll bet you have: you’re in a class and you quickly discover that the instructor’s goal is just to get through a certain amount of material. Whether you actually understand it is not part of the equation. I think the same dynamic is often at work when people write. They’re seeking to communicate something, but mostly they appear more concerned with getting it off their chest than in ensuring that the message is received.

What are the hallmarks of this kind of writing? Undefined acronyms and references ("My school.” Which is where? What kind of school? What do you do there?), stream of consciousness sentence and paragraph structure, and my personal bugaboo, misspellings and grammatical errors.

“Oh, Lynn,” you might say, “that’s not fair. Grammar and spelling rules in English are really hard to learn. You can’t expect someone to observe all that minutiae.” Whether the rules are hard or not is debatable, but the fact of the matter is they are the conventions we use in order to understand each other. When I teach my Introduction to the World Wide Web, I tell the students that transfer protocols (http, ftp, SMTP) are agreements between computers to share information the same way so they'll understand each other. Rules governing grammar and spelling are the same sort of thing, and disregarding them amounts to breaking a covenant with your reader.

"Aha," you might rejoin (Wow, you're really being feisty about this issue!), "but you break grammar rules all the time. Why, I can see you're just itching to start a sentence with a conjunction like you always do." OK, but I learned in school that breaking grammar rules on purpose isn't poor writing, it's stylized writing. The author who does this is actually creating a new covenant with his/her readers, like when a poem is written in dialect so readers will experience the lyrical qualities of unfamiliar sounds. If I come across something like this I still may choose not to read it, but I will have some respect for the writer's cleverness, creativity and courage.

On the other hand, even if I concede to the clueless blogger that the conventions are hard to learn and apply, that makes the abdication of responsibility even worse. It's like she/he is saying, "It's too difficult for me to figure out whether to use 'there,' 'they're,' or 'their' in this sentence. Instead I'll just type whatever comes to mind. The reader can expend the effort to figure out what I mean." Thank you, but I must respectfully decline.

What did you see today?