Prompt 10: What is good writing?

This is a question that writing teachers struggle to answer, but it is at the heart of what you are learning through your work with this class. If you can begin to answer that question then you are on your way to become a reflective writer which will in turn result in your continued growth and development as a writer after you leave this class. That continued growth and development is my goal for you because I can only hope to effect so much change in one semester – certainly not your complete transformation as a writer – and also because at some point you need to accept your own responsibility for your growth and development as a writer. I can give you advice and tools, but ultimately you are the one who determines your future as a writer.

So let’s reflect on what makes good writing as we consider what others have to say about the subject:

·         The Principles of Good Writing

·         What is Good Writing?

·         What is Good Writing?

Nothing too earth shattering here, right? Probably all ideas you’ve heard before and came up with as you considered the question yourself. It is not that these ideas are wrong BUT they are too limiting, in my opinion. Is all good writing the same? If you are a good creative writer does that automatically mean you will be a good journalist or technical writer? Once you’ve achieved the status of a “good writer” does that mean you will never struggle as a writer again?  OK, that question made me laugh out loud and if I addressed it to my friends who work as professional writers they would probably smack me on the back of the head.

So writing with purpose, organizing your ideas, and observing the conventions is not enough to be a good writer. It is true that organization and conventions play a role in all forms of writing, but simply having a clear purpose is not enough – your purpose has to serve the needs of the intended audience. It is not enough to know what you are writing, you also need to know whom you are writing for and what they need and want from your writing. Good writing achieves your purposes and serves the needs of your audience.

Organization and conventions are important in every piece of writing BUT without understanding the expectations of your intended audience and the conventions of your intended format and genre you still could generate “bad” writing even if it is well organized and grammatically correct. Most audiences/communities expect good writing to observe grammar, spelling, and punctuation conventions but they are more willing to forgive the occasional convention error than your misunderstanding of the essential function of your piece.

Too often school writing is all about form (the surface structure and appearance) but in reality good writing is much more about function. This is not to say that grammar, spelling, punctuation, organization etc. are not important – they are very important as they can distract from and even interfere with the function of your writing and certainly influence the reader’s judgment of the value of your writing. However, in my belief as a professional writer and a writing teacher, it is the function that ultimately determines what is good writing and what is not.

What I want you to think about now, after considering the implications of this is to think about what this means for the evaluation of your writing. I have not yet created the scoring guide for your formal report (the big assignment which will culminate your project) and thought it might be helpful for you to work with me to create it. This is in part so you can create your own checklists for future projects as well as take another step in your development as a writer by making you more self-regulating.

Your job for the reflection cycle is to think about what qualities we need to consider in terms of evaluating your reports. Look at the scoring guides I created for the proposal and literature review.  What I do first is to come up with a list of topics or qualities that I consider essential to a “good” proposal or literature review and then begin phrasing the question or statement that covers that quality and sets us up to assign an appropriate value on the scale (5 = definitely to 1 = not at all). I may decide that some qualities should be weighted more heavily than others. I’m not asking you to create the whole scoring guide – just a list. I hope through our discussion this week we will be able to combine and refine a list that helps us all learn a bit more about evaluating writing. Your reflective Tweet can touch on that lesson rather than your evaluation list.