Something I’ve learned from my own writing is that it’s possible to copy edit a piece of text into illegibility.
When I look at my stuff from the heyday of blogs, half of it is, “wow, did I really write that?” And the other half I have no idea what I was trying to say.
From the readers side I prefer that approach, too - I’d rather have the content available with some typos than stuck in the editing pipeline of the author. If it’d be a book or some professional publication, I’d probably have higher expectations, but for someone who has no dedicated person hunting copy mistakes - let’s cut them some slack.
The other thing I learned is you can get quite good at writing if you do enough of it. I've never been that much of a writer, but I ended up as the internal communications person at my company. Not exciting at all. I was actually dreading it.
After doing it for a year, I got pretty good at it (I'd like to think). I'm able to pretty quickly throw together an email or press release that's clear (avoids BS corporate speak), concise (summarize a paragraph in one sentence) and sets the right tone (why should the reader care).
Now I read others people's work (not talking about this blog post at all, I haven't read it) and subconsciously edit it my head.
My takeaway? Anyone can be a good writer with enough practice.
When I look at my stuff from the heyday of blogs, half of it is, “wow, did I really write that?” And the other half I have no idea what I was trying to say.
Sometimes it’s better to just stop and publish.