Lessons in blog writing

"I am ... interested in keeping smart, honest bloggers from tripping over their own bad writing habits and making their valuable insights difficult to digest. These rules, then, are intended to address the writings tics that even good bloggers fall into." So writes Helen Rittelmeyer in this blog post on improving blog writing: New Year's Resolutions for Bloggers. (Hat tip to A Conservative Blog for Peace.) She provides a great run-down on some helpful tips on cleaning up and improving the kind of short-form writing that lends itself to blog-work. Here's a particularly good piece of advice:

Good writers don’t make allowances for intellectual idiocy. It would be absurd if you felt the need to write, “The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. Socrates, of course, was a philosopher in ancient Greece. A philosopher is someone who ponders the big questions that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time. Greece is a country in Europe.” Why should anyone bother catering to moral idiocy?