rbacal - 8:42 pm on Sep 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

In the sense that it's my living? Nope. It would be fair to say that, in part, other people's writing is my living.

Not being critical here, but if you are a writer as a profession you have a different understanding of the more subtle stuff, in the same way that a professional webmaster is going to know a lot more, and a lot different stuff than a person who once built his own website for fun.

It's clear you don't have all that much experience re: writing as a business. I'm sure you know lots of other stuff.

Ok. I have time. Lets not confuse what is "good writing", and what constitutes a "good article". They are quite different. Good writing is what we'd expect regardless of medium (with some exceptions) and it involves the mechanics, good sentence structure, proper use of words, punctuation. Pretty much all writing is evaluated by those standards.

But what constitutes a "good article" is much different, and the standards used to evaluate same are quite different for different media, audiences, etc. An article for an academic journal, for example, could be excellent for that context, but absolutely unpublishable in most other print or online contexts. And vice versa. I can tell you that as a former academic journal editor, we called articles that don't fit, "bad", or "really bad", or "man, this sucks bigtime".

One specific difference - length and depth. I have a lot of print material I ported over to the net, but I can tell you that now I do much smaller articles (and a lot more), so people can go direcly to the specific thing they want, and not have to hunt through, let's say a 3,000 word piece.

Finally, (and this is something most people don't think about being a professional writer involves being in business. We (as with many other fields), are not going to give you the same kind of attention for a 100 word filler that pays $5. compared to a 3,500 print piece that pays $750.

The quality thing is a bit of a red herring. A piece has to be "good enough" to satisfy the client, and we're talking business here, there's a business limit on how much time, research, editing and energy pro writers will spend on a piece, and that limit is related to what you pay.

What satisfies the editors and readers of Playboy (I pick that because it's a high pay market) is different than what satisfies the editors and readers of The Podunck Review which is different again from what may work for a website owner.