Writing sites

I've been around the web a lot, and I've seen a lot of writing websites. As with most things, there are some good, and there are some bad. When it comes to writing, you'd think all you'd really have to do is provide a space in which text can be placed, but you'd be surprised at just how wrong that assumption is. Even here, on blogger, there's more to what makes it an enjoyable experience for me than the fact that I have a document which I can type in to, hit submit, and it's out there for people to see. There's a reason that you don't see books out there that are the size of your standard printer paper.

There are several things that make writing interesting, and I find that nearly every website out there, good or bad, has some of the right aspects and some of the wrong aspects. Let's start with the most basic part - the document itself. You need to have a smooth, easy to comprehend and use document that gives you all the parts you need to write - and admittedly, there aren't that many things you need. Ease of scrolling, plenty of space, the ability to bold or italicize, and a word counter. You'd be surprised how few websites actually have all of these, though. Blogger lacks a word count, for instance, which is something that is highly frustrating for me with a word count goal on a daily basis.

The next is a goal. This doesn't apply to all sites, obviously, with things like blogger depending on you making your own goals. Which is fine. But there are sites that give you a daily minimum that you should be writing, or where each piece of writing has a maximum word count that you can't go over. These kinds of things test your ability to adapt, and say what you need with the space that you have. That's an awesome thing, and lord knows that I have days where I simply don't know how I'm going to hit 500 words with the topic that I'm writing. At the same time, a site that I used to use a lot called typetrigger limits you to 300 words, and trying to fit a meaningful piece of writing into that space is quite a fun challenge. But, to me, something like twitter which limits you to barely a couple dozen words is just asking you to confine your thoughts.

The last thing, the thing that seems to pop up when I least expect it, and the thing that I think should never be, is judgement. Now, there's a difference between criticism and judgement, and criticism is incredibly important. Being told automatically that I have made spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes is fine, and important. But there are sites that go beyond this, and though I'm sure they don't mean to, it goes into the area of judgement. For instance, I use a site called wordcounter to, get this, count the words, specifically for these blog posts. It's easy. Copy paste it in, it tells you how many words it is, a couple other interesting statistics about what words you use most often or whatever. But recently it started analyzing the reading level of what you post in to it.

There are a lot of problems with this. This is based solely on the words that are put in, as far as I can tell. I'm not big on fancy language. I want my story to be focused, to have a point, to make it so a reader can understand what they're reading. That goes far beyond the "quality" of my writing, and it certainly can't be analyzed by some computer logarithm. Yet, with nearly every post I make, I am told that my writing is on a 7th-8th grade level. Somehow, I find it unlikely a 7th or 8th grader could write the things that I am writing. I admit that I am writing quickly, with lesser depth than a full story, but still. Come on.

Personally, I think that to find the best site, you can't just stop at one. You have to find a bunch, and pull from them all, use them all continuously, challenging yourself to work within the good and bad of them all. Nothing is going to be perfect, so you can't just stop in one place and say that it's the be all end all. You keep going, and you keep learning. And eventually you'll get what you need.