Defining Good Writing

One thing I hinted at in the first post I wrote, but did not acknowledge entirely is the highly contextual nature of “good” writing. Communication in any form has many nuances, and writing is no exception. Does a piece of writing properly meet the needs of the audience that will be reading it? Does it utilize rhetoric in the most effective way possible? Basically, does it communicate what was intended to who was intended to recieve it? Does the children’s book apprise and engage the child? Does the scientific journal article properly inform and engage the scientist? If they do, then they are probably good writing. They get the job done effectively.

We had several multilingual student in my class, all of which beautifully translated pieces from their languages into English for an assignment. One student who had a particularly memorable translation shielded herself from praise by saying again and again that she couldn’t take credit, because the original author himself was the one who had written them. But certainly she had to admit that not all translations are created equal.

There are many, many elements a translator has to juggle to retain the original intent and integrity of a piece. The primary is that the original message has to come across. I can think back to all of the times my Swedish professor has looked at us regrettfully to tell us that a word has no direct translation. In other words, it can be difficult even to provide a basic gist of a piece in another language, let alone all of the elements that should come into play in a truly good translation.

One horrible result of only ever reading the final product of published material is the wall it puts up around the actual process of creation the piece went through. It was something that ate away at me as a writer trying to start things, even before I was able to acknowledge it as one of the sources of my problem. 

There’s a subconcious pressure to make things right the first time. It’s not as if we read a series of drafts before reading the final edited piece. It would discourage me to no end when I finally got the nerve to write something down only to read it back and realize that it was garbage. The beauty of writing is the level of editing that can go into it. I wished I had been told that more directly when I first started writing. I wish I could have seen behind the curtain of an experienced writer. Now, I have access to that through my talented friends and it continues to make me better all the time.

I learned this semester that good writing is almost never original. The concept that an idea or piece of writing belongs entirely to one person is a really Western idea. It’s derived from our capitalistically steeped mindsets. We’re taught in school for our entire lives that plagiarism is a crime punishable by expulsion. You could get caught dealing drugs or destroying school property at your college and recieve a punishment less severe. We’re taught that the only people who plagiarize do it out of stupidity and laziness. It perpetuates the problem by mystifying it and preventing anyone from reaching the root of the issue.

Telling students they should never take and build on the ideas of others. As far as I know, that’s how the process of art and science alike work. Artists begin by copying masters who copied the masters before them. They trace lines on a light board, they copy sentences with their own stand to understand another person’s style. Scientists take previous bodies of research to develop new avenues for their own. When we write introductions for a lab report, we summarize existing journalistic writing to contextualize our own.

Here is an excerpt from a piece I wrote at the start of the semester when asked to select a good piece of writing and state why I believed it was good writing.

In the personal essay “Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner the author gives form to the formless by telling his story of homelessness through the lens of dumpster diving. He tells the reader what his time as a homeless man taught him about the transience of ownership and that self-reliance can betray itself in many forms. The reader might find themselves entranced by the breadth of knowledge condensed in the essay. His diction is thoughtfully rendered to convey a deeply intelligent, yet down-to-earth tone. Eighner’s grip on flow is also something to behold. He uses a one sentence paragraph here and a question there to maintain dynamic without imparting the impression of chaotic.

 The essay opens with a bit of humor and transitions to conveying expertise through talking about his process. “I learned that “Dumpster” is a proprietary word belonging to the Dempsey Dumpster company.” Eighner goes from the procedure of finding edible food to his method in narrowing down which dumpsters produce what and what that means about the people themselves who create the waste. It maintains a sense of whimsy while building tension with the unspoken. Under close inspection, the reader can pick up on Eighner’s loneliness and stress and the comfort of distraction that scavenging seems to offer. He talks about his dog as his lone companion. “Although I hope I get off the streets so that Lizbeth can have a long and comfortable old age.” The essay is arguably a bit long, but I believe there was a method to that. A topic so uncomfortable as homelessness should be dwelt on, even to the chagrin of those who would rather not think about it.

A couple of things I notice about what I wrote:

1. The piece is a personal essay, which is a popular choice for many when asked to cite a good piece of writing. In my class, we discussed the bias of emotional appeal in many people’s definitions of good writing. People respond very strongly to their emotions being related to. I’m no exception. But effective communication can come in many forms and contexts. 

In theory, good writing is just any piece that allows the writer to effectively understand themselves and be understood by others. But there are lots of things that muddle this clean-cut definition of good writing. The first pieces that come to my mind when I try to think of good writing are determined by my formative experiences. 

My highschool writing education was heavily focused on literature. The English teachers I had in junior high and high school were generally passionate about their work and determined to push me. AP English courses were one of the only AP classes offered at my high school because we had a teacher with the qualifictions and wherewithal to teach them. Because of this, I developed my opinions on literature and how to write about it more than I learned how to write on any other subject in high school.

I had taken a college in the schools course in physics where we had been required to write lab reports, but my teacher had little skills or interest to teach us how to write them well. He would grade them arbitrarily and we would move on having learned nothing. That was my most advanced experience with a science class prior to leaving high school a year early to attend Gustavus.

I feel like these experiences left me with a bias. People favor familiarity, and the writing I was most familiar with was what I had encountered in my English classes. I wish that my earlier education had introduced us to lab reports and writing about technical topics at a much younger age. I could have developed a greater comfort with it before college.