Mark Goodacre pops up a thought-provoking post over at the NT Gateway Weblog about how internet access can interfere with scholarly writing. Jim West disagrees and states his reasons.

I have sympathies with Mark on this one, but I'd rather proffer a mediating position. It's not a dichotomy; it's a both-and situation. The extremes (tracking down every weblog discussion vs. throwing out the internet) aren't good at all. There must be balance. In my mind, there are times to research, and times to write like the dickens (or, better, to write like Dickens -- he was one wordy man!). But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is paying at least some attention to the various discussions going on in biblioblogdom that makes us all more well-rounded, and that ends up making our writing -- whatever the venue, be it web or print -- all the more better.

I understand Jim West's point completely. I know that the words I write on this blog will reach more folks than anything I ever might publish (and me publishing something is a big stretch, I think).

Some days, I think bloggers are more like the pamphleteers of days gone by -- writing short missives that get printed and distributed and printed and distributed with or without the author's knowledge. And there is value in that. But there is also value in the writing of longer, more comprehensively worked tomes; those are the ones that will provide the foundation for the future discussion.

So I say it's about balance. And that means shifting sometimes. And I think that's more what I hear from Mark -- Take some time to focus on larger projects, not forsaking blogging but simply not focusing on it to the detriment of other writing projects destined for distribution outside of the web.