George Micros

What is good writing? It is not always appreciated how important and essential writing has become to our everyday lives. In an eort to put things into perspective lets look back in time. Not too many centuries ago reading and writing were acts reserved for the social elite and royalty. The ability to learn new things was constrained by social encounters and folk lore. People were bound by the shackles of ignorance and illiteracy and were unable to establish personal independence. Since then many things have changes. The printing press revolutionized society by readily disseminating knowledge to all. Today, the structure of our society depends on written text - for information, communication, and education and writing plays a central role in many aspects of our lives. As a result it is necessary for writing to be eective, ecient and overall good. That in turn raises the question of what constitutes good writing. The word writing has the connotation of literary writing to many. Work of art that has been studied for years by scholars falls into this category. But this only a small part of what constitutes writing. The writer need not be a best-selling author to be considered a good writer, or a writer at all. The point of writing is to write and good writing wants to be read. Generally, when people write things they want to preserve them and perpetuate them to other people that are interested in hearing what they have to say. Thus we can say that the main goal of any writing is to transfer the writers ideas to other people that are willing to read them. If the main purpose of writing is to introduce readers to the writers ideas then good writing will facilitate this process. Good writing should with ease and grace inform the reader about the authors ideas. But it is not just stating ideas that make writing successful, it is necessary to include the process the author followed to reach his conclusion. Good writing expresses thinking and thought processes. This type of writing does not blindly direct the reader to his conclusion, but allow them to consider how the conclusion was reached. Everything that the writer says should reex on his mental state and try to express that so 1

the reader can understand his thinking. This is usually executed in a more structured than abstract way. Ideas are arranged in a logical order with smooth transitions that tie the ideas together. Starting with the simplest idea that establishes a foundation to expand upon, the author constantly justies what is stated claries his thinking. Structured writing is eective writing. Writing that is structured and well organized promotes quick and easy reading. The easy it is to understand and the more able the reader is to get into the writers mind, the more eective we can say the writing is, After all, that is the overall goal of writing, to transfer the writers ideas and thought process to the reader. When writers organize and structure their work they facilitate this process and help the reader in his eort to understand. Thus we can conclude that structured and well-organized writing is eective and ecient. But the matter at hand is whether it is good or not. Good is very vague, but it can be dened as that which is not bad. So eective writing is not bad. But what separates well written work that is not bad, from work that is good. If expressing the authors thoughts is not bad, it can act as a foundation to create good writing. So what needs to be added to his writing to make it good? A reasonable assumption is emotion. Aside from expressing the authors thinking, good writing must also invoke the authors emotional state. This may seem unjustied or counterintuitive at rst since explaining ideas doesnt involve any emotional implication. This is true, but writing is destined to be read by other people, humans. Emotion is an essential part of the human condition, more generally of any living creature. People and animals both rely on instincts to dierentiate danger from safety. These instincts are developed through the conditioning of past experiences with a certain emotional signicance in the evolutionary sense survival of death. Emotion is the rst stage of reaction to a stimulus. Even before processing of the information, an emotional label has been places on it. This is commonly known as a gut feeling about something. It is easy to conclude that the emotional state produced in the reader is very important in the process of attention and comprehension. Using the structure as scaolding the writer needs to enrich his text. Everything the writer says should invoke an emotion in the reader and allow

them to relate to the writing. The structure of the writing provides the proper organization for the writer to expand within. The emotional context is what allows dry paper with ink scribbles on it to transport the reader to the setting that the writer is talking about. This type of writing helps the reader visualize the writing and puts them in the scene, where they are able to interact with the information and experience it rst-hand. Experience is the pinnacle of understanding. If the writer can help the reader visualize the experience then the writing is truly eective eectively and then ideas and thought processes are transferred seamlessly. This is an important factor in good writing. Good writing evokes an emotional potential in the reader and leaves him with the memory of an experience of reading, rather than the memory of reading. The idea of good writing is abstract. It is not a characteristic that can be quantied of even qualitatively be dened. Good writing does, however, rely on some fundamental building blocks to ensure its goodness. Primarily writing must be structured and organized. The author must make an eort to present his thoughts in a neat and tidy way for the reader to follow. This way the author can gradually introduce the thought process that allowed him to reach his conclusions. The reader then has the freedom to dissect the writers mind and thinking and extrapolate further information. But this is only eective writing, a basis for good writing. Writing that is good allows the reader to experience and feel what the author is saying. Good writing must take the plain text and use it as a tool to evoke the readers emotions and allow them to understand the writer.