Ranma Al'Thor wrote:

On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, David Homerick wrote:

This is rather poor reasoning.  Bad formatting is usually a software
problem and has nothing to do with the ability to write a good story.

In my experience, it's usually the result of the author being unwilling to
make sure the story fits the standard 80 character line length.  Someone
who is sloppy with that is usually sloppy with other things as well.  It
can result from software problems, but usually it's because someone didn't
take precautions, like changing the margins before converting to Ascii,
etc.

And in my experience, turning a word processing document (soft returns,
special characters) into an ASCII e-mail message (hard returns, no
special characters) can be a serious pain in the ass, especially if
you're unfamiliar with one or both programs.  

The ability to properly configure one's software and the ability to
write well simply have nothing to do with each other.  Many people, for
example, don't quite grasp that e-mail isn't WYSIWYG.  Obviously,
they're idiots, right?  Wrong.  If you put William Shakespeare in front
of a computer and told him to reformat his story "The Two Gentlemen of
Nerima" for the FFML, he'd screw it up, sure as you're born.  Does this
mean he's a bad writer?  Obviously not.

-- David