An observation about editing.

I have presented four editing workshops in the past month. “Before You Even Open Your Mouth,” which I presented three times, is specifically for professional speakers. “Write Right, Right Now!” is specifically for authors, and I presented that once. Each workshop featured two self-tests, and each of the self-tests had 21 sentences.  The sentences on the self-tests for the speakers groups were speaker related, and the sentences were from “professional” speaker websites; the questions on the self-tests for the author group were more author related, and those were taken from the websites of editors, publishers, and professional authors.  I didn’t get too “deep” into editing because of time constraints, so I focused on basic principles: it’s versus its, spelling, the placement of quotation marks, noun-pronoun agreement, and so on.
The reason I’m saying all this is because I started noticing—and my audiences weren’t far behind—that the writers of the “featured” sentences not only made one (or more) punctuation/grammar/misspelling mistake in each of the sentences, their writing itself was bad. People in my audiences were trying to improve the writing as well as correct the mistakes. I had to keep saying: Ignore the writing! We’re here to talk about punctuation and grammar!
And my point—finally—is this: The lack of a foundation in basic punctuation and grammar rules leads directly to poor writing. In other words, you can’t build on a shaky foundation. Punctuation, at its core, is about organizing thoughts. Without a logical way to organize a thought, the thought can’t be communicated clearly.  You might be able to write poorly but correctly—God knows lots of people can pull that off; however, I do not believe it’s possible to write well but incorrectly.
I hadn’t really seen this connection until yesterday, when I finally had enough experience presenting these workshops to realize that each time I’d given the workshop my audience was frustrated about the quality of the writing, and I decided that the reason the writing was so bad is because you can’t have good writing without good punctuation. It can’t happen. It doesn’t happen.