Good writing isn’t easy. It’s hard. You must know what information or ideas you’re trying to convey, organize your material, then present it clearly and concisely via the written word, sentence, and paragraph in language understandable to your readership.
I revise. I don’t think much of anything gets published without being edited and changed, often many times. After writing for 60+ years, I still don’t feel that I can get it right in the first draft. That’s normal. Every writing teacher I’ve ever encountered has emphasized the importance and necessity of revising. The original Hemingway manuscripts are full of line-throughs and insertions. He also had a world-class editor (Max Perkins).
You do basically three things when revising. One, add things you missed or skipped in the first draft that should be there. Two, tighten it up. Three, make sure it’s clear. This involves among other things simplifying, shortening, and clarifying any ambiguities. (An English professor once told me, “Don’t ask yourself if you’ll be understood; ask yourself if you can possibly be misunderstood.”) First drafts can almost always be improved.
Copyediting is a specialized kind of editing. It comes after writing and revising. Wikipedia describes it as “the process of revising written material to improve readability and fitness for its purpose, as well as ensuring that text is free of grammatical and factual errors.” They could have added, “and typos.” I think of copyediting primarily as cleaning up the manuscript. Doing your own copyediting entails spotting your own errors, but “spellcheck” software automates the process. (However, using this software properly can be tricky; for tips, see the Wikipedia article here.)
How do you become a good writer? The best way is by being a good reader. People who read professionally written and edited books, magazines, and newspapers learn to spot when something doesn’t “look right,” be it a spelling mistake, grammatical error, typo, or awkward or misuse of language.
Discipline yourself to use language correctly and precisely. Choose the right words to get what you mean across; don’t use “phase” in place of “faze,” or “diffuse” when you mean “defuse” (two of my chalkboard-grating peeves).
Don’t assume you know what words mean, or how they’re spelled; check before committing them to paper or pixels. Use a dictionary for meaning and spelling, and a thesaurus to search for better word choices, if you’re in doubt or dissatisfied. When writing on a computer, this is fast and easy.
Good writing takes time. As with anything else, hasty work looks sloppy.
Practice, practice, practice. Like anything else, the more you do, the better you’ll get.
Is it worth the time and effort? Probably not, if you’re sexting. Or dashing off an email to the babysitter. But in professional settings, yes. People who can write and speak well impress. When you present ideas clearly and logically, your audience is more likely to believe you know what you’re saying. This is as true of speaking as writing.
It depends on the writer, subject matter, and what you are writing.
There are novelists whose first draft is near perfect. They do it al in their head. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is an example. While James Joyce “Ulysses” was a decades long trudge of rewriting.
Newspaper reporters could get their story right the first draft.
Of course these examples ere not done on computers. Which many writers find to be marvelous, but may allow one to be lazy in a way that pen and paper does not.
And there is in the newspaper world and real world time lines, and good enough. At least for government work, which is why laws and budgets done in the legislative sausage works get all fouled up. No one is responsible for what a committee writes.