Are we losing the ability to write, and do we care?

There's an interesting post over at e-Consultancy this morning, berating website owners for not realising that small improvements to web copy could actually make a big difference to profits.

Then at CatalystBlogger recently, Jennifer Williamson had a moan about copywriters being asked or expected to do stuff for free, and why that's wrong.

There's a common theme here - the perceived value of good writing (or rather the lack of it).

I've always felt the number one reason for this is that everyone can basically write, so it's not seen as a specialist skill, like, say, design. In a world where everyone writes, what makes a writer special?

Then again, all the evidence points to standards of literacy falling, certainly in this country. Kids grow up texting and have no need to learn long words, nor how to spell even short words or construct sentences. Very few 16 years olds are required to write essays or read anything remotely challenging - one girl I know went to sixth form college with the required pass in GCSE English, without having ever read a newspaper or a novel by a dead author, or written an essay longer than 500 words. She's bright, but no demands were made of her at school. We tolerate spelling mistakes even from authority figures such as teachers and national newspapers.

Perhaps writing is a dying art. And yet ... the internet is still a text based medium, and even the dominance of video, music and photo sharing hasn't eliminated the need for words to communicate.

So in a world where fewer and fewer people write, shouldn't that mean the writer's skills are valued more highly?  Or, as it seems at the moment, will we lose the ability to discriminate and just settle for any old rubbish? As the cliche goes, 'In the land of the legless, the one legged man is king'.