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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33615
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33615
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

That is an interesting question and and interesting observation. Is the Stack Exchange answer a distinct genre? Or perhaps more broadly is the QA site answer a distinct genre. If it is, I think it is an example of a more pervasive genre that was created by the Web, which we might call persistent conversation.

Persistent conversation is a type of communication that is not as formal, not as researched, verified, and worked, as you would find in a formal publication such as a journal or a book. It is a contribution to a forum where other voices are being heard and it is subject to commentary and editing, and where it will remain on permanent public display. Therefore a great deal more thought and discretion goes into the composition than you would give to a chance utterance in private conversation. It is this status as new genre that leads to so many debates about the appropriate level of formality, correctness, and editing that should go into composing any Web posting.

This certainly affects how people write SE answers. Yes, they put some thought into what they say and pay some attention to how they say it (some more than others, clearly). But they publish with far less care and polish than they would if they were writing a book or a journal article. I think there are a couple of contributing factors to this:

1. You know that if you miss something you will have the chance to edit it and if you get something wrong or miss something, someone will correct you and you will be able to fix the problem. 

2. To the extent that you are interested in gaining reputation, speed matters. We would like to think that a great answer posted a week after the question was asked would slowly get voted to the top, but we all know it won't. First to answer is a big advantage in the reputation sweepstakes, and this creates a clear incentive to get an answer out quickly. 

That said, I think I have a distinct approach to answering questions (on this site, anyway) and that is to tie the answer back to a general principle. You should do X because of principle Y which is based on human characteristic Z.

One of the consequences of this approach is that I often end up stating the general principle with very little caveat or refinement. This sometimes leads to disagreements that would take far more room than this format permits to fully explore and resolve.

On the other hand, I personally feel that merely making a suggestion without tying it back to a principle is of limited value. Such suggestions have no provenance. They don't really meet the SE criteria for providing objective researched answers.

But those criteria, which were developed for answering programming questions, don't really fit writing questions. Programming is highly analytic, breaking problems down into smaller and smaller pieces. Writing is synthetic, bringing all the pieces together to work as a whole. This naturally means that any writing question has very deep and complex roots. To deal with them in this format requires some means of simplifying the complex set of principles and practices that would inform a full answer.

Original score: 21