Six Questions for Blogger, cont.

The subject of this series is the amateurish and ineffective explanations and directions on Google's Blogger, the site that hosts this blog. Earlier posts in this series appear below.

Question #4: Is consistency of style in written text—generally considered helpful, even essential, to effective communication—valued at Blogger?

The house text on Blogger.com is skimpy and inadequate for average users like me who want to do more than simply start a new blog. As thin as it is, though, the text has a number of errors. These strongly suggest that Blogger's management is either unaware of or places little value on norms and standards related to effective written communication.

One example, a minor one, but indicative of sloppy writing and editing. In the Settings menu, you'll find this sentence:

If you select "No" your blog will not appear in these places, but it will still be available on the Internet.

Just below this, you'll come across a similar sentence:

If you select "No", everyone can still view your blog but search engines will be instructed not to crawl it.

Clearly, no competent editor is looking at this text. How else to explain the inconsistency in the use of a comma at the end of the dependent clause that begins this sentence? (Never mind that in the second example, the comma is incorrectly placed outside the end quotation mark, about which, see yesterday's blog below.)

My point isn't really about this particular example. Even the best edited posts and publications include errors. My point is that by ignoring professional standards, Blogger.com is dissing its users and probably compromising its own prospects. Which is a shame, of course, since this site is a great resource with great potential.