The word processor made good writers better and bad writers worse. Good writers know that very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time or the fifth time. For them the word processor was a rare gift, enabling them to fuss endlessly with their sentences–cutting and revising and reshaping–without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?

E-mail (or discussion boards or blogs) pushed that verbosity to a new extreme: chatter unlimited. ….If the writing is often garrulous or disorganized or not quite clear, no real harm done.

E-mail, the Internet and the fax are all forms of writing, and writing is, finally, a craft, with its own set of tools, which are words. Like all tools, they have to be used right.

From On Writing Well by William Zinsser