Good and Bad Writing

Examples of Bad Writing:

"There is an individual": This example is bad writing because it "has no direction" and "gets hyped up"; the thesis (my paraphrase), "everything in the world just may be precisely what it is", is revisited many times, under the needlessly pretentious title "ethical relativism", and is left thoroughly undeveloped by the end of the essay. A priceless quote: "It has been said that ethical relativist's [sic] are believed to think ethical relativism is true" (my emphasis). Are you kidding!?

"This change": This example is bad writing because it "is too clever by half". The whole (run-on) sentence could be summarized, with minimal loss of detail, as "this helps".

"a child that is lost": This example is bad writing because it "tells lies" and "has no direction". The fact that religion is sometimes present in the presence of parents does not mean that it is useless in the absence of parents. Also, the initial thesis is "how is it said that people have such strong emotions from a science experiment", but somehow the paragraph concludes talking about God and Freud, with no mention of the origins of the universe. The only link between those two is maybe that they are deterministic scientific theories, whose methods probably imply that the universe is a "science experiment", but this connection goes totally unmentioned.

Examples of Good Writing:

"The Spawning of the Capelin": This example is good writing because it is highly descriptive and precise, while maintaining conciseness. The author's awareness of the audience (Scientific American readers) is clear through the amount well-condensed relevant (factual and emotional) information.

"The Genes for Color Vision": This example is good writing because it is well-directed and is highly aware of its audience. Personally, I found the introductory quote misleading (I was expecting the article to read more like a science textbook), but because the piece is intended to expose and illustrate the scientific phenomenon of sight instead of explain its reasons, the quote is well-placed. It contains an excellent poetic image to demonstrate what sight is and how it works. The mechanical description of the eye is clear and unhindered by theories or specific jargon.

"Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?": This is example is good writing because it gives concise, logically accurate demonstrations of its (non-trivial) arguments. It also effectively exposes the current interests of science as compared to the typical person's interests (Scientific American exists for this purpose).

Reflection:

When assessing the quality of writing, consideration of the audience is crucial because different people will respond very differently to different kinds of style and content. Despite the fact that I did not respond positively to a quote from a 19th-century poet in a science article, my understanding of the author's intended audience allowed me to correctly assess the writing as good. However, making the realization I did was quite difficult, simply because I began reading with an expectation very different from that of the author, so I quickly became confused and upset. The audience is the most decisive factor when assessing writing because reactions vary widely from person to person; if you are not the intended audience, even if the writing is good, you are likely not to appreciate it. The audience is a very difficult factor to assess because it requires a thorough understanding of the writing's context and a willingness to step outside yourself for the sake of accuracy; if you're at all like me, this can be very difficult.