On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
No. But necessary as long as we prize accuracy above beauty.
If we want people to read our articles, the bottom line is that they have to be readable, and good writing is about creating narratives that people can actually make their way through, rather than overly focusing on grammatical points (though that matters too).
On the other hand, if all we want is to be a resource that people scan in order to pick up a few facts, the writing is less important. It would be interesting to have the technology, as newspapers do now, to find out how much time readers actually spend on particular articles.