How do you judge "good" writing?

April 12, 2015 5:32 AM

Several friends of mine are published writers in various platforms. I see them - or even my non-writer friends - comment on an article someone had written and all totally agree some piece is terrible, which I had read, but I'll have no idea why. I usually just nod my head, because I feel too sheepish to ask about something which is apparently so obvious to others.

I'd like to know what if any mental parameters people use to establish a piece's quality.

I understand sometimes it's subconscious, but if people could lay out some criteria, I'd appreciate it (other than basics like grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc).

I would like to be able to offer up "qualified" opinions myself, and understand how to judge my own writing eventually (I've been told it's "good," sometimes "great," but they could always just be being nice, you know?).

posted by meeeese to Writing & Language (21 answers total)

When I think an article is terrible, it's usually because it betrays a lack of critical thinking on the author's part. It doesn't address opposing views adequately or at all. It might use a straw man argument to persuade readers. Those types of things.
posted by schroedingersgirl at 5:59 AM on April 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: When I used to grade college papers, I would tell my students that if I can get through their paper without noticing the writing, they'd get full credit for the writing quality portion (these were scientific papers). If I actually enjoyed reading it, I would comment on it and add some extra points if I could.

Bad writing examples: sentence lengths are not varied and words are overused, colloquial phrases, bad metaphors, no flow from one thought to another, overuse of any word other than "said" for dialogue, bad rhetorcal techniques, etc.

Good writing is like good music - the word choice, the thought progression, the sentences - it all flows together as one. Every word is carefully chosen and the writing is clean, without unnecessary words or descriptions. To me, each poorly chosen or poorly placed word is like discord and after too many, the piece is ruined. Reading it is too much work. Cleverly written sentences or unexpected but perfect word choice is like an unexpected surprise and a gift from the writer.

Spending a lot of time reading works from good writers all help, as will reading a book on rhetoric. Remember that at a certain point, good writing becomes subjective, and once you're confident, loudly and publicly pointing out bad writing can become a hobby.
posted by umwhat at 6:11 AM on April 12, 2015 [9 favorites]

Best answer: I wouldn't feel sheepish; some people just like to loudly assert their ability to judge these things.

That said, the closest I've ever been able to get to an objective definition is that writing is good to the extent that it renders itself invisible, delivering the reader into the experience that the writer seeks to evoke, rather than drawing attention to the writing itself. This doesn't necessarily mean that the personality of the writer must become invisible; sometimes the point of a piece of writing is to evoke the experience of being in the company of that writer as they rant angrily or crack jokes or show off. But any writing that makes me focus on a sense of the writer sitting at a laptop constructing the sentences out of words – that's bad writing.
posted by oliverburkeman at 6:15 AM on April 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Information motherfucken flow.

Oh, and clever avoidance of cliche.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:20 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have a degree in English/Creative Writing and sometimes I can't put my finger on why something is "Bad" or "Good".

Maybe it's like pornography: You don't know what it is, but you sure know what it is when you see it.
Or hear it.
Maybe it's discordant on the ear; the sentences don't have the musical flow. They didn't edit or read it aloud.
Maybe it's illogical and doesn't have a narrative flow; the author jumps around too much.
Maybe it's meandering, and the author doesn't get to the point until the last paragraph and the last 5 paragraphs didn't lead up to that point.

These are a few off the top of my head, and those which I encounter most often.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 6:24 AM on April 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

There are some rules, many of which amount to stylistic preferences (a rule like "lots of adverbs = bad") but some of which are not. A thoughtless reliance on cliché suggests the writer is not particularly thoughtful or insightful about her or his subject and craft.
posted by erlking at 6:56 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

If all they have to say about a piece is that it's terrible, you should question their critical abilites, published authors or not. A criticism worth making will have a lot more to say than that. Often people say something is 'terrible' just to indicate that they have the right taste or are in the right social group and these people couldn't explain why they think it's terrible any better than you can. You see this a lot on Metafilter in most FPPs about a piece of writing, unless that piece of writing happens to line up with the sociopolitical slant of the site, then it gets more of a free pass that neutral or opposing pieces won't.

Don't be afraid, ask your friends to explain themselves. Pay attention to which ones can do so and which ones can't; you'll see patterns.

Read criticism: book reviews in the New York Times Book Review, Harpers, The New Yorker, any literary magazine.

I really like the podcast Scriptnotes, by two professional screenwriters about screenwriting. A regular feature that they do is a three page challenge, where they'll read and summarize and make available the first three pages of an aspiring screenwriter's script, and then explain what is good or bad about it.
posted by Kwine at 7:38 AM on April 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm not good at this either, but I'm also trying to develop that sense. I wrote this Ask a while back on something really similar (not sure if you're talking about the quality of the writing itself, or the quality of the arguments in the article), and there were some good tips for developing a sense of good vs. poor prose.
posted by tchemgrrl at 7:44 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I just finished correcting some student assignments and I was just thinking about this. The problem is that it is relatively easy to pinpoint what constitutes "bad" writing but the characteristics of "good" writing can be hard to explain. I like the way umwhat describes it: good writing, like good music, is harmonious. It just works.

Examples of good writing I encountered today (this is mainly about argumentative texts):
- Illustrating abstract notions by using (fitting) examples.
- New and unique insights. Novelty sparks interest.
- Articles that are written with an audience in mind. The author tries to entertain, relate, get the readers' attention, etc.
- Rhetorical tricks work.
- A good structured article: making the aims of the text clear; use of logically sound arguments; logical coherence of paragraphs.
- Simplicity is better than complexity and short sentences are better than long ones.

I agree you should ask your friends what they liked or didn't like about specific articles. There are many ways in which you can be a good writer and as is the case with music, personal taste does influence appreciation. (Also, sometimes people just like something because they like the content of an article, because it fits their worldview. This has nothing to do with good or bad writing.)
posted by leopard-skin pill-box hat at 7:49 AM on April 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

There are two different likely aspects here, style and content. Judging style is more subjective, and reading a lot of well-regarded writers in all genres can help you develop an ear for style. Judging content is more about critical thinking. You said "articles" rather than "stories," so I suspect your friends are critically thinking more about the content than the style.

There are some strategies for developing your critical thinking skills, and you can also ask your friends to elaborate more when they do give judgments, just with "What made you think that?"

I would not recommend getting into a Devil's Advocate role with your friends and trying to point out their own reasoning flaws, when you get to that level, because that's annoying. You can and should, however, do that to yourself and your own reasoning.
posted by jaguar at 9:15 AM on April 12, 2015

For me, it's about the flow of the sentences--if I read something aloud, and it sounds pleasing to my ear, I think it's good writing. The cadence, the word choices, the way the writing flows--these are what make the writing work for me.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:15 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

What Kwine wrote about reading criticism is a really good idea. That's where you see people explicitly articulating their criteria of judgment about writing in concrete cases and with intelligence. In addition to the journals s/he mentions -- especially the New Yorker, which tends to embody good writing -- I'd recommend checking out the London Review of Books and/or the Times Literary Supplement.

Good writing, for me, usually goes beyond rhetorical competence and argumentative soundness and involves levels of language use that are poetic and enough investment of the author's personality that his or her ethos is palpably in play. The kind of writing some have mentioned that recedes unobtrusively so that information or a logical sequence of thought is efficiently conveyed is preferable to incoherent or clumsy writing. But it must be content to be admirably serviceable. Really good writing, as such, does something more. Maybe one could say it is capable of expressing not only arguments or factual concepts, but even thoughts, which are more full-spectrum forms of cognition. Thoughts are thus also more elusive and more reliant on a masterful use of language to be communicated.

(To see extreme examples of the expression of 'thoughts', read, actually, the longer speeches in Shakespeare. There's something of that in any good writing.)
posted by bertran at 9:22 AM on April 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I try not to judge things without making some effort at looking at how it functions, and I usually wouldn't say that something is bad without saying what I would try to do differently to make it better. So I'm getting the impression that your writer friends might be guilty of the same things that they don't like in others people's writing: not being clear about what they're saying, and maybe jumping to conclusions.

(Grammar and spelling problems don't really bother me. I mostly expect it in student work, and I blame the editorial policy in published work.)
posted by ovvl at 9:26 AM on April 12, 2015

I tend to only say a piece is terrible if it is difficult to understand and if I think that difficulty stems from something in the writing style or the structure. For example, if the piece jumps around from topic to topic without clear signposting, or you feel like the author was lazy in terms of thinking about what they were actually trying to say and coming up with a conclusion or some sort of clear framing. Or if the writing itself is unnecessarily obscure (run-on sentences, interminable sentences or paragraphs that cram too many ideas together, fancified language for no good reason).

Otherwise, if the piece doesn't actually preclude understanding, but it is not to my taste, I will refrain from calling it terrible, but I think I'm in the minority there. A lot of people will say something is "terrible" if it disagrees with their political views, if the writing style is not the way they would choose to write, or if it contains information or digressions that they are not interested in.
posted by lollusc at 9:27 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Practioners of a craft love to run down other practioners of the same craft, excepting friends and role models. Don't assume all the critical comments actually have substance.

The two things that bother me most frequently are writing that is too florid, and questions that are raised only to be ignored or left unanswered.

When I mentioned this question to my wife, she suggested comparing articles in the NTTomes Magazine to articles in the New Yorker.
posted by SemiSalt at 9:34 AM on April 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

As a fan of Melville and Wolfe, I'm a defender of long sentences and visible prose. If I don't notice the prose, I feel bored and impatient, and I'd much rather read a story with too many skillful adverbs than a story whose author has counted their adverbs like calories. That's all taste, though, so let me try something vaguely objective:

Good writing needs both surprise and precision. It uses striking phrases and original illustrations, but it uses them for something. One reason why visible style gets such a bad rap is that when a writer is mostly excited about style, it's very easy for them to get distracted from their characters or arguments -- to lose focus, to become a machine-gunner instead of a sniper. Every obsession has its traps, but the stylist's trap can have especially gory results.

But I think you're as likely to be right about these pieces as your friends are. Our whole reading history comes together to determine whether we're going to find a piece beautiful or surprising or dumb or offensive, and it's not even that people who have read more will always have better taste. Sometimes a piece's real quality will be invisible to a reader who's read a lot of things on the same subject and feels jaded. Or sometimes a piece will be crap, but people in its field will be legitimately impressed because it's a new kind of crap.
posted by thesmallmachine at 9:37 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Other people have mentioned the larger issues, but I'll take this opportunity to vent one of my pet peeves, one that no one at my former job cared about but me: Thematic and metaphorical consistency. This is the most obvious with clashing cliches — you don't blaze trails on open seas or leverage focus or take a new tack on a dead horse. Management buzzword jargon is particularly vapid due to needless puffery, and for me it shows two things: First, that the writer is lazy and not actually giving the writing much thought, and second that they don't want the reader to think very much about what the words actually mean either, which is a pretty glaring sign that there's bullshit ahead.

Years ago, I had an editor who was insistent that every piece, if not every line, should answer the question, "So what?" or "Who the fuck cares?" with the implicit charge to not waste the reader's time. Having been an editor myself now, that's one of the harder messages to get across to writers — while I appreciated the blunt formulation, I've since learned that many writers are at best annoyed by having to justify their prose so obviously. But a lot of writers forget that the point of writing isn't to exercise their skill as writers or indulge their fancies, it's to make the time and effort of the reader worthwhile. Keeping that in mind has helped me cut out a lot of precious frippery and to also remember that often connections or allusions that are clear for the writer are needlessly obscure or vague.

Which also highlights something that I think can get lost when reading published pieces: Pretty much everyone benefits from an editor, and often a lot of the weaker writing I see online is stuff that clearly hasn't had an editor's touch to it, doing things like polishing points or characters, buttressing structure, and making sure that the reader's time and effort are rewarded.
posted by klangklangston at 1:29 PM on April 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Good writing doesn't trip you up. It doesn't faff around with words that aren't accomplishing the goal it has set itself. Good writing doesn't need any additional context or explanation; it is its own context and explanation. Good writing is subtly different from good words - you can have wonderful turns of phrase that don't belong in the piece you're writing right now ('kill your babies')

You can have adequate writing that breaks all these 'rules', but good writing doesn't.

As to criticism, if you can wean yourself off responding to crits even when you really really really want to, it will improve your writing. Speak through your words not about them.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:37 PM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Judging writing is highly subjective. I see people spitting all over writing that seems totally fine to me all the time. If all of your friends are consistently in agreement over which pieces are 'good' or 'bad', then I think that says more about your friends than it does about that piece.
posted by sam_harms at 3:38 PM on April 12, 2015

inexperienced writers lean on personal narrative - and try to generalize their knowledge and experience of something to 'most people'.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:20 PM on April 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Before I found a much more pleasant job I blogged for a living, and here's what I can tell you about the difference between the posts I wanted to write and the posts that were assigned to me based on search engine traffic to a particular headline, say, or my just being the only person around when news broke. The good stuff:

1. Had a clear reason for existing. A weird thing about so much of the writing we do being assigned one-to-many in classrooms is that we grow up thinking of writing as something a bunch of people do according to a particular set of specifications. This happens to be true if you blog for someplace that's taken venture $$$, but the best writing we do after we graduate gets done for some reason.

If a bunch of people had made the point I wanted to make, and they'd done it well, I tried not to write my own post. If they hadn't, I felt like I had to explain things as they appeared to me. (If I had to write the post anyway, because it was my job to distract people from their jobs so that they would look at advertisements, it was not good.)

2. Made a narrow point broadly intelligible. What j_curiouser says about inexperienced writers often citing "Most People" really resonates with me. Bad student writing often takes a very broad point—one that's frequently not true at all, or not interesting if it is—and tries to fit the thing they're talking about onto that big, vague pattern.

You will probably recognize this from a bad five-paragraph essay: "Throughout history, humans have been bad to each other. The Nazis were bad to many humans because..." I'm not saying it's necessary to work inside-out—from "The Nazis were bad in this particular way" to "through this one impulse the Nazis launched millions of unending internet arguments", or whatever—but a writer who's doing that is at least trying to tell you something you don't know.

(You'll recognize that second trope from so much public radio—Radiolab could, without the loss of too much fidelity, be called "Maybe This Person Who Had Something Really Terrifyingly and Fascinatingly Unique Happen to Them Represents All of Us...")

I read a lot of sportswriting, and good sportswriting—even the stuff written for a very narrow audience of mathematically inclined sports fans—would make sense to any patient reader, because the numbers and the jargon are really just narrative. "1-3, 2 K, HR (31)" is a compressed account of a particular event that concerns some group of human beings; a good writer, depending on his reason for writing, will unzip that and explain why those humans cared then and he cares now.

I think he should also be hyper-conscious of his limits, and the limits of his material—that is, he should avoid the thinkpiece problem, in which every song Beyonce releases, every episode of Game of Thrones that airs, every online outrage that somebody's intern perpetrates is held up as a crystalizing example of How We Live Now. But a lot of very ambitious thinkpiece writers obviously disagree with me, so I could be wrong.

3. Knew why it was making you read something. The posts I'm still proud of were clear enough on their reason for existence, and modest enough about the point they were making, that there is never any doubt as to why I'm telling an anecdote or taking the story off the rails for a moment.

If you have a lot of meetings, like I do now, you may be familiar with the kind of coworker who is not entirely clear on how or why he disagrees with you. If you're talking about widget production, he will start either so far back in first principles that you're 20 minutes from disagreeing—"Throughout history, people have made widgets"—or so far ahead in his own argument that it's impossible to direct him to the stop you got off at—"why would you not want to make a bunch of profitable, easy, low-risk widgets?"

Bad writing often spends too much time clearing its throat, like a 350-word plot synopsis in a 500-word movie review, or not enough time laying out what is really its argument. (Bad political writing is especially guilty of the second one; if you're writing for a public evenly divided on abortion, say, and you begin by writing what amounts to "Since we agree that abortion is murder, why would anyone think it should be legal?", you've misread not only your audience but the argument you wanted to make.)

I think a lot of that comes from just not knowing why you're showing something to your reader, whether that's in a broad sense—"I don't know why people are reading my movie column"—or a narrow one, like "I've got this paragraph that explains the ending, but I don't know what it's doing in this piece, but then I've already written it, so..."
posted by Polycarp at 7:04 PM on April 12, 2015 [5 favorites]