In order to write, we need to be able to master many things. Our brain generates thoughts which we organise into ideas that we then transcribe as messages for other people to interpret. Most adults are able to write, but can most adults write well? In this article, I am going to explore the concept of what constitutes good writing and what it means to different people, before drawing my own conclusions.
I've been writing all my life, and have been lucky to have seen my words published in five different decades. Blimey, I have only just realised that. Since the 1980s, my words have appeared in journal articles, in printed booklets, in research studies, on websites, and more recently in a book. I have always been fascinated by human communication and our ability to express ourselves in written and spoken form. I trained originally as a speech and language therapist and studied linguistics in depth, enchanted by its simultaneous complexity and simplicity; what's going on in our brains and bodies as we communicate involves a bafflingly complex set of activities which all have to be coordinated, and yet most of us do it without even thinking.
There are some wonderful scenes about writing and literature in the film Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams plays maverick teacher Mr Keating at a very traditional boys' school in 1959. In an early scene, Keating asks a student to read the introduction from their poetry text book.
Neil reads:
"To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great."
After a brief pause, Keating utters a single word.
"Excrement."
He then instructs the boys to tear out the page of the book and rip it up. He proceeds to teach the boys to appreciate poetry for how it makes them feel rather than concentrating on any measures of correctness. He encourages them to express themselves individually, to live life to the full, and to look at things from different perspectives.
Keating is eventually forced to leave the school and his class is taken over by the very traditional Mr Nolan, played by Norman Lloyd. The first thing that Nolan does is ask the boys to turn to the page about appreciating good poetry, which of course has been ripped out.
Despite the film being set in a white male privileged environment, I loved it because I would have loved to have been taught by Mr Keating.
The opposing views of Keating and Nolan are very much visible in the writing world today. In Facebook Writers' groups there is often lengthy and lively debate about what constitutes good writing, and there are still these two broad camps. On the one hand are those who believe that good writing follows certain fixed rules which are universal. These rules include use of grammar, syntax, spelling, punctuation, and how to write a story. There are numerous resources online for people to find out more about these rules, with countless articles and helpful diagrams. Good writing is sometimes compared to maths and physics, just as Mr Nolan taught.
There are many, many books about how to write and what constitutes good writing, according to the rules. One of the most popular seems to be Stephen King's On Writing, which I haven't read but have read about. He delivers advice on the importance of the mechanics of writing, including vocabulary, grammar and style, and on the art of writing. The book Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, advocates for a zero tolerance approach to punctuation. In case you're not familiar with the book, the title is an example of when punctuation changes the meaning of what's written. "Eats, shoots and leaves" is very different in meaning from "Eats shoots and leaves." There are many other examples of this phenomenon, often used for comedic social media posts. Here are just a couple:
"I’m giving up drinking, for a month. Oops, incorrect punctuation... I’m giving up. Drinking for a month."
"The use of capital letters for names is the difference between I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse and I helped my uncle jack off a horse." Eww.
Those in the other camp talk about pushing boundaries, experimentation and creativity. There is a self-published author on one of the Facebook writers' groups whose writing polarises opinion. English is not her first language but it's the language she loves to write in, and she's developed a unique style. The sentence structure is unconventional, and the writing is dense, complex and full of unusual, sometimes archaic words. Some criticise it for being grammatically inaccurate, some say she writes like Yoda, some say it's too flowery and she needs to reign it in. But others love it, saying it's poetic and beautiful, and she has a loyal following. Assessing her writing against a checklist of rules, she would score poorly. But she doesn't care; she revels in being different, in breaking the rules.
Even in this camp, most people writing about this subject seem to say that it's important to know the rules in order to break them. The articles I have read about breaking the rules all suggest that you can break the rules to enhance your writing, but only if you are acutely aware of the fact that you are doing it, and use it as a conscious literary tool, breaking the rules in a measured, balanced way. Examples might include using split infinitives, the omission of certain punctuation marks or capital letters, inventing new words, ending a sentence with a preposition, or employing the use of sentence fragments for emphasis. Something I do a lot.
Saying a good writer has to have perfect grammar and know all the rules of writing before they can attempt to write, could turn writing into a tick-box experience, as if it is indeed a mathematical process. But writing is also an art, a messy creative process. Of course to an extent it all depends on context, on what type of writing you are doing. There is still an expectation in academic writing that rules must be followed for clarity and let's face it, credibility. But if you're writing a novel and your character is the driver for a drug cartel, you're possibly going to break all sorts of rules in conveying the way he speaks and the situation he is in.
Rules of language are important and have their place, but so does the voice of the writer. Emerging writers can be very put off by a rigid approach. I've met several new writers on Facebook groups and I have supported them by beta reading. One woman expresses herself absolutely beautifully through her writing, but makes a few mistakes around tense due to having English as a second language. Some people say that you should only write in your native language but I disagree; a good editor can pick up on minor grammatical errors, whereas a good writer is the one having the ideas and expressing them, and having a few errors in the execution is easy to remedy. Another author I am supporting is retired and has never written before. He is penning a fictionalised account of his grandfather's experiences as a stretcher bearer in World War One. He's not been taught anything about writing since he was at school decades ago, and yet he has a natural affinity with words and writes so that you are right there with the characters. His voice deserves to be heard as much as anyone's.
Is there something tangible that empirically separates good writing from mediocre or poor writing? And have the same rules always applied? An online search about what constitutes good writing generates a plethora of definitions and ideas. Here are just a few examples of what people say good writing involves:
Clarity
Focus
Organisation
Ideas
Themes
Voice/individuality
Word choice
Well crafted sentences
Vocabulary
Grammar
Style
Originality
Credibility/believability
Thought-provoking or inspiring content
Editing
Thinking of a specific reader
Planning
Fact-checking
Effort
Regularity
Risk
Purpose
Context
Here in the UK, go back several centuries and writing was only for the elite as most people were unable to read and write. Education if there was any, was focussed mainly on Bible studies, With the advent of a broader education (for boys) came the need to teach in some form of structured way, and that's when spelling became more uniform and the first of the modern era dictionaries appeared: the first fully English dictionary arrived in 1604. Nowadays, anyone can write a book or a poem or a story and get it seen by an audience, whether that's through self-publishing, writing a blog, or getting traditionally published. There are more ways than ever before to have our words read by others. And the availability of so many platforms also means of course that there are more ways than ever before to have our words criticised by others. Well-meaning experts, as well as those whose motives may not be so altruistic, can crush the confidence of people just starting on their writing journey. We are told that the world of publishing is a cruel and harsh place, and that we need to be resilient and tough to survive in it, as well as having perfect writing.
Language evolves. This happens gradually, but changing conventions over time mean that most of us wouldn't be able to read and understand much of middle English, where many words were different, and when spellings were inconsistent. New words are constantly added to the dictionary and linguistic conventions change. And that's good. From my London student days in the early 1980s, I remember my linguistics lecturer explaining that it was impossible to place certain determiners and relative pronouns together as they made no sense. Examples would be "my that" or "some who" or "every whom." I felt really smug as I said, "What about Every Which Way But Loose? and Any Which Way You Can?" These two films had been released a few years previously. He looked rather exasperated as he shrugged, and said something like, "But those are just film titles. You can't say those phrases in real life." Fast forward to 2024 and the phrase "every which way" is in common use. And a quick online search reveals that in America, it's been used as far back as the early nineteenth century. I was also taught never to start a sentence with the word "and." And when I first started doing it, it felt a bit rebellious. And a bit wrong. The world is ever-changing.
If we look back to that list of all the things that represent good writing in the 21st century, there's very little about the reader experience. The writer is I suppose naturally focussed on their craft. But who are they writing for? People write for all sorts of reasons - to inspire, to impress, for therapy, to educate, to enthrall, to excite, to frighten, to make money.
For me as a reader, the bottom line is that good writing is anything that holds my attention and provides me with an immersive experience. A person who did this for me was Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos which accompanied the 1980 tv series of the same name. He wrote about science, maths, philosophy and astronomy in a way that was bordering on poetic, and his words, as well as his thirst for knowledge and understanding, were nothing short of life-changing for me.
For me as a writer, what's most important about my writing is that it is understood, and that it is of interest. I'd like someone to get something out of reading what I have written, enough perhaps that they might even want to know more about the subject in hand. I know for other writers, their motivation is different. And there's enough room in the world for all of us. There's too much cynicism as far as I can see. Most of us won't become best-selling authors. Annoyingly, some who do aren't great writers in my opinion. Nevertheless, everyone has a right to write, whoever you write for, whatever you write.
If you have found this at all interesting, you might like to look at some of my other blogs about writing, which I post every month or so.
Bent Is Not Broken. Buy the eBook (various platforms) or get the paperback on Amazon via:
***Queer Indie Awards 2023 Winner:
Best Non-Fiction***
***Readers Favorite Five Star Award***
To read more blogs and to find out more about the author, head to www.bentisnotbroken.com
Image of a page from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:
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