[ 1 ☽ 31 ☼ 2015 年 ]

Anonymous Submission: 
"Do you have a favorite writer? Even if you don't *like* everything he/she has written, you think highly of that person."

Published writer or unpublished?

For either question, I probably don't have a favorite.

I often tell my little brother that the ideas conveyed by an essay are far more important than the language used to express it. A pretty, flowery piece of writing that has no content is meaningless. The message that the author intends to transmit is FAR more important than the technical details of how s/he accomplishes it.

I think good writer is someone who is good at conveying their message in an effective way.

Sometimes poetry might be an effective way to communicate a message.

Sometimes it might not.

Sometimes succinct and clear language is effective way to communicate.

Sometimes it might not.

By the way, I hate the hemmingway test. Clarity should not be the primary metric of determining good writing, because clear writing doesn't necessarily make effective writing. Different situations can probably be better expressed with different literary techniques and styles.

For instance, someone is rambling or very confused or something may be better suited to really long run-on sentences because it communicates something that may not necessarily be well conveyed through clear writing that passes the hemmingway test therefore we shouldn't look down on styles of writing that we aren't that familiar with especially because writing in the very end is simply about communicating things that are not easy to communicate.

No one style is superior to another.

No technique is universally appropriate.

That's why I can't definitively say that someone's writing is better than another's. Because writing is so intrinsically tied to people's voice and their identity.

When you evaluate someone's writing and say Person A's writing is better than Person B's, that's almost like saying Person A is a better human being than Person B.

You might think I'm crazy for saying something as insane as that, but writers are touchy. Our writings are mirrors that expose ourselves to the world in ways that we can't communicate through speech.

Some person's writings might be prettier, more elegant, more convincing, or more amusing than another's, but no—I would struggle to answer whether someone's writings are "better" than another's.

PS. I do find Z◼-kun's writings to be kind of pretty. It's why I was attracted to him in the first place.

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【 fwachan - written 1494 days ago 】