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veqq  23d ago (text post)   Edited 23d ago   786 thread views

What's Good Writing to You?

Lately, I've proofread some friends' articles, native and not, on political and technical matters. In no case, did I only guide them to my preferred style (poetic diction, preferring verbs over nouns, participles over finite verbs, archaicizing, Germanic purist including V2, no hyphens) and rather enjoyed seeing, sampling (and rejecting) their distinct tastes. I once wanted to ask a friend who wields fiery invectives to liven up my (technical opinion) prose, but realized his style was ill-suited to sewing my bullet points together.

What is beautiful literature to you? Or clear and precise technical style? What do you just hate? Most importantly, what do you aim for and avoid when writing yourself?

I'm curious for opinions on all languages (even programming or e.g. programming code comment style) but naturally English is our community's shared tongue.

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I don't think there's a single condensed heuristic or rule of thumb that separates good writing from the rest. Different writers seek different things, so their process and manner of attaining them is going to be different, too. Some writers are very interested in people, others in places, and others in emotional sentiments or intellectual concepts. What works for one literary pursuit doesn't need to work for another.

I think if we want to attempt to overcome this inherent ambiguity and actually try to find common ground within good writers that are good in vastly different ways, we could use Marcus Aurelius' creed of "every action receiving its proportionate worth" as a starting point. When I think of the bad writing I've read, it often comes down to the author not being able to create distinctions - all sentences are of the same length, there's a systematic insertion of adjectives before most nouns no matter how relevant the noun in question is, everything is either too descriptive or fully devoid of it, etc. In essence, there's no melody or form (in the sense of structure) to the text.

Good writers may have styles, formulas, even tropes, but can reshape them continuously to fit many different moulds - moments of levity, beauty, tension, fear, comedy, and ecstasy can all be woven into one coherent piece of writing, because the writers know which central ideas and feelings they want to determine the reading of the text, and thus calibrate each action to it's worth in reaching that end. I'm making this sound more mathematical than it is, much of it is intuitive or a matter of practice and can't be "hacked" or "figured out" through an equation.

"The first and perhaps only rule for good style is to have something to say." - Schopenhauer

This Schopenhauer quote can be horrifically misinterpreted if one assumes he's saying that writing/art only needs a "message" to be beautiful. This is obviously not true, and the measly attempts to pass off the promotion of political and activist causes as a meaningful criteria for the evaluation of art speak for themselves.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/arts/design/venice-biennale-review-art-israel.html)

What Schopenhauer is talking about is more akin to a certain cognitive clarity, i.e. "having something to say" about something that one has given considerable thought, reflection, experience, questioning, etc. This is why certain writers can extract wonderful, even lengthy pieces of writing out of the simplest topics or ideas. Herman Melville immediately comes to mind as someone who can seemingly wring every last drop of poetry and insight out of any given topic related to the sea:

"And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."

There is a certain "knowing" at play here, which doesn't have to stem from actual experience per se (although in Melville's case, he had an extensive experience of seafaring), but can come from a directed focus of the mind towards something. There's something akin to philosophy or rational thought happening there, but there's equally a large space for reveries, poetry, and inspiration being given.

Good writing is the mix of the expected and the unexpected to create impact on the reader.

Compare this comment I replied to a prior SSS post asking if Poetry has any use to communicate information over prose:

Rhyming (or other forms of meter like alliterative verse) has obvious benefits for memory, so in the sense that it sticks in my mind more quickly that kind of language is going to be more useful for getting across an idea in a sticky way.

I think we're going to get into a discussion here over what constitutes grasping or conveying meaning.

Consider the Clarihew

George the Third Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.

Would the sentence

George III was a pretty bad king.

get across the same meaning more quickly?

Probably yes, in the sense that you'll get what is being said in less time and can move on. But more people will remember the Clarihew, a week or two from now there's a good chance that a good percentage of them will be able to repeat it back to you even if they only read it once. I myself looked that poem up just now, after reading a reference to it in a children's book (I want to say one of the Indian in the Cupboard series) twenty-five years ago. So in that sense the couplet "George the Third, Ought never to have occurred" gets the reader to grasp the meaning and retain it much more quickly than the same message in prose. People will hear George III mentioned, connect it to "ought never to have occurred," and recall that he was a bad king. It would take reading much more prose to get a similar average retention rate.

This has long been the purpose of poetic meter, from marketing jingles to heuristics to nursery rhymes to epic poems.

{End of Prior Comment}

This applies equally to poetry and to prose, though to differing degrees in context. Psychedelic novels have more room to be unexpected, and greater expectations of unexpectancy, than technical manuals.

DFW is cited elsewhere in the thread, and I'm reading Infinite Jest right now and I'm struck by his talent. But also consider punchier writers like Hemingway, or Robert E. Howard.

Ordinarily one runs into text and it just slides right off. I'm realizing in real time this may be specific to me, I'm a confirmed wordcel at work and play. I scan two newspapers essentially every day, I work with text, and it's the unexpected sentences that stick with me, sometimes for years. The Clarihew stuck with me for decades, despite reading it merely referenced in another novel. I read DFW's String Theory years and years ago, but when having a conversation about athletes these paragraphs came back to me instantly and I looked it up to send to a friend (FWIW I disagree with a lot of the first paragraph):

But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus [37]. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

The idea that there can be wholly distinct levels to competitive tennis–levels so distinct that what's being played is in essence a whole different game–might seem to you weird and hyperbolic. I have played probably just enough tennis to understand that it's true. I have played against men who were on a whole different, higher plateau than I, and I have understood on the deepest and most humbling level the impossibility of beating them, of "solving their game." Knowle is technically entitled to be called a professional, but he is playing a fundamentally different grade of tennis from Michael Joyce's, one constrained by limitations Joyce does not have. I feel like I could get on a tennis court with Julian Knowle. He would beat me, perhaps handily, but I don't feel like it would be absurd for me to occupy the same seventy-eight-by-twenty-seventy-foot rectangle as he. The idea of me playing Joyce–or even hitting around with him, which was one of the ideas I was entertaining on the flight to Montreal–is now revealed to me to be in a certain way obscene, and I resolve not even to let Joyce [40] know that I used to play competitive tennis, and (I'd presumed) rather well. This makes me sad.

Famous first lines, like:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Or opening poetic stanzas:

‘My uncle, what a worthy man,
Falling ill like that, and dying;
It summons up respect, one can
Admire it, as if he were trying.
Let us all follow his example!
But, God, what tedium to sample
That sitting by the bed all day,
All night, barely a foot away!
And the hypocrisy, demeaning,
Of cosseting one who’s half alive;
Puffing the pillows, you contrive
To bring his medicine unsmiling,
Thinking with a mournful sigh,
“Why the devil can’t you die?”’

Or

Sing, Goddess, sing the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus—
that murderous anger which condemned Achaeans
to countless agonies and threw many warrior souls
deep into Hades, leaving their dead bodies
carrion food for dogs and birds—
all in fulfilment of the will of Zeus.

Start at the point where Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
that king of men, quarrelled with noble Achilles.
Which of the gods incited these two men to fight?

All combine the expected and the unexpected, juxtaposing what we think will come next with what the author inserts. All stick in my head.

I'm really partial to Murakami's style. I really like Wallace although the example others often use of his isn't my favorite:

She had promised to get him a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of unusually good marijuana, for $1250 U.S. He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to stop. He always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he’d think and decide to have some in his home one more last time. One last final time he’d search out someone new, someone he hadn’t already told that he had to stop smoking dope and please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. It had to be a third party, because he’d told every dealer he knew to cut him off. And the third party had to be someone all-new, because each time he got some he knew this time had to be the last time, and so told them, asked them, as a favor, never to get him any more, ever. And he never asked a person again once he’d told them this, because he was proud, and also kind, and wouldn’t put anyone in that kind of contradictory position. Also he considered himself creepy when it came to dope, and he was afraid that others would see that he was creepy about it as well. He sat and thought and waited in an uneven X of light through two different windows. Once or twice he looked at the phone. The insect had disappeared back into the hole in the steel girder a shelf fit into.

I love his essays and humorous nonfiction more.

It's a complicated question. While I can determine what kind of writing is bad, I have little experience producing good writing. I don't find writing easy, so I haven't been able to make myself sit down and write something at least the size of a short story since I was a teen.

But perhaps if I invert everything I don't like about fiction, I'll be able to show what writing I consider good. Let's alliteratively name these aspects plot, pacing and palatability.

The plot is the harmonious interaction of three conflicting ideas:

  • the author has a story to tell. The story has a structure to it: it begins, it unfolds, it culminates, it comes to an end the author wanted
  • the world and the characters the author writes about have a life of their own, their own internal consistency
  • the rules of drama restrict both the author and his creation. The author can subvert them, but not disregard them

Take Noble House by James Clavell as an example. The protagonist has an almost herculean list of tasks to solve and watching him come out on top is the principal appeal of the novel. Among other problems, his company urgently needs a line of credit and his daughter has a loser boyfriend. He strikes a deal with an American bank that needs a foot in the door in Hong Kong and when he notices the banker catching the eye of his daughter, he asks her to give him a lift. The only problem is that the banker appears at his doorstep out of the blue. This fits the goals of the author and doesn't violate the rules of the world he's writing about. Why shouldn't a foreign bank capitalize on the vulnerable financial position of a major company in a mutually beneficial way? But it still violates the rules of drama.

The pacing is the amount of prose it takes to get from the one scene to the next. It's a flexible quality: shorter narrative forms require faster pacing, and the same form can be faster or slower-paced. But there's always a limit to how much you can stretch or compress a story: children usually write at a breakneck pace, web serials are too long for me to enjoy.

The palatability is the textural quality of the prose itself. Douglas Coupland has extremely palatable prose. Some of his novels have meager plots, but the prose is so good the books just slide down your throat. Stieg Larsson has terrible prose. His first novel had a good editor, but the second one, published posthumously, probably didn't, and I found it extremely uncomfortable to get through. However, I do not have enough experience to dissect and analyze this quality.

...and I'm off to the gym without editing this or writing a conclusion.

Take Noble House by James Clavell as an example.

It’s funny you mention that, I just recently watched the miniseries adaptation with Pierce Brosnan. The TV version is pure 80s soap opera cheese, but also a very interesting look at a time and place that no longer exist.

  • Tell me up front any surprising or interesting takeaways, so I know whether I ought to read it. If there are none, delete.

  • Get to the point, as efficiently and clearly as possible. Smaller sentences are always better, as we digest information in units. Long sentences are for pretentiousness or concealing stupidity, or both.

  • If you have successfully organized the information well, you can make it enjoyable to consume. Never in such a way that it negates the significance or order of the information. A little wordplay, a fun reference, or a surprising melding of ideas are best. Scott does this well. TLP did this well.

  • if you are writing fiction, make it moral, otherwise you are selling the equivalent of a gas station transfat high fructose corn syrup snack, and you should feel eternal shame. “Oh wow, so fun to read” — are you a child? Moral means, “retrospectively this experience was greater for longterm holistic wellbeing than the alternative experiences presented to me”

  • Polemics are enjoyable to read. Reading something angry and opionated is fun. Because we like fights and drama. Angry opinions are more fun to read than the castrated disinfected writings of academics.

My personal opinion

So, mostly just AP style?

Use of rhetorical styles (zeugma, etc.) unselfconsciously, purpose, poetry, alliteration, consonance, and, of course, smarts and clarity. Many in this forum amaze me routinely.

What's good writing to you?

Much like pornography, I know it when I see it.

What do you just hate?

There are certain works of art that cause one to lose faith in art as such. You have to just get away from them, or they end up dragging you down and making you doubt yourself. I suppose, if we can speak at all of "hatred" for ink on a page, it would be all the writing that induces this feeling.

Code, technical writing and prose:

  • Naming. Proper filenames, headlines, class/method signatures etc. are essential for being able to find the right piece of text in the first place, and for having the right idea of what to expect and how to approach it. The purpose of the document in question needs to be immediately obvious.
  • Scope. The document should contain what it needs to contain to fulfill its purpose, no more and no less. In our digital age it's trivially easy to refactor text documents and move questionably relevant content elsewhere. The shorter your text is, the easier it is to place, understand and maintain.
  • Structure. Bottom line up front. Keep together what belongs together. Make sure information that's required to understand subsequent information actually comes first. Introduce acronyms with their full name before using them in short form. Use consistent and uniform style and language throughout a document. Use appropriate hierarchical depth.

Fiction:

  • Don't write just to generate content. Nobody needs empty literary calories. Those who demand them anyways can be duly served by generative AI. Only write if you have a point to make, a story to tell.
  • Be aware of the language you use. Your vocabulary, style and other features of language should be chosen deliberately to suit the work, and you as the writer should be sufficiently competent in their use. Employ the chosen style consistently.
  • Do your research. Even for elements that only make brief appearances or play only tertiary roles, make sure you actually know what you describe and have more than a one-dimensional idea of it. Readers in the know about the element will appreciate not getting Gell-Manned, and if you write only for those not in the know...then why include that specific element at all? Good writers know what they're writing about.

Political manifestoes, rants, diatribes:

  • Don't.
  • If you already did, find the nearest dumpster.

It has to have certain flow and be aesthetically pleasing. Gary Provost nailed it

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

Good writing is writing where the author has a clear purpose in writing, and makes sure that every word they write contributes to that purpose, and that the writing as a whole fulfills that purpose. Concrete examples:

Technical Specifications

Technical specifications SHALL transfer interconnected technical concepts from author to reader effectively. Authors MUST choose precise terminology to minimize ambiguity. Authors MUST NOT use inconsistent terminology for the same concept. Authors SHOULD use plain language where specialized terms aren't necessary. The effectiveness of technical specifications MUST be measured by reader comprehension and ability to implement the specified requirements.

Literary Writing

Literary writing unveils truth through disciplined craft. Each sentence serves a purpose, with no wasted words. Language crafted with intention builds worlds in minds, connecting through shared experience. Good prose moves with the rhythm of breath; sometimes shallow with anticipation, sometimes deep with revelation. It respects the reader while guiding them through labyrinths where reality and imagination blur into something truer than either alone. What remains unsaid matters as much as what appears on the page.

Academic Writing

Academic writing employs a formal tone with third-person perspective and precise terminology focused on research problems (University of Southern California, 2024). This specialized communicative practice conveys complex ideas within scholarly communities through evidence-based argumentation rather than personal opinion (Walden University, 2024). Scholarly writing requires proper citation of sources following consistent formatting conventions, demonstrating engagement with broader literature while establishing credibility (Scribbr, 2024). Effective academic writing spans descriptive, analytical, persuasive, and critical purposes, requiring writers to consider multiple perspectives while developing coherent arguments supported by appropriate evidence (University of Sydney, 2024).

When I read good writing I feel like I am learning. Maybe each paragraph contains a clever sentence structure or analogy, or the worldbuilding is fresh and new and developed well and has lasting implications on the rest of the story.

When I read great writing I feel like this hits on every level. Sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, character to character, plot development to plot development, everything is thought out. Every piece of information, every word choice, every character's choice has a purpose and is trying to tell the reader something.

Good writing is something beyond technical skill and authentic expression.

I would describe it as a religious experience: that you are offering yourself to a divine muse: and you are a conduit for something unearthly. It passes through your unworthy hands and is lessened by its transcription onto the page. Something pure and real, an echo of a sublime vibe that trembles through the air.

It is the most satisfying and furious passion I have experienced in my life, and everything I've done as a writer is chasing the dragon of communion with that mayfly feeling. Words fail to describe its swelling intensity: you can see reflections of it in truely great works. I hope at least some of you get to experience it someday.

It's probably because I've had my brain rotted by the internet and videogames, but I prefer writing that it's simple and clear. Straight to the point, with minimal fluff. I know that there's a place for the more flowery, poetic writing but I just can't enjoy it anymore, and I find it gets in the way of communicating complex ideas.

I do appreciate advanced vocabulary though. Like the standard writing advice is to not use adverbs, just find a better verb/noun instead. "don't say she was very sad, say she was morose." That sort of thing. Not only does it sound better, it also helps clarify just exactly what's going on.

It’s the skilled expression of the author’s own voice. I can’t be of much help, in the same way Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition of obscenity — "I know it when I see it." — doesn’t help anyone who isn’t Potter Stewart.

Stephen Fry recounted heavily cribbing, paradoxically, from Hemingway and Wilde, and being worried he had no real style of his own. He was then delighted when a classmate sussed out Fry had written an unsigned editorial in the school paper, telling Fry there wasn’t anyone else who could have written it.

Wolfe has a section early in Back to Blood where the slapping of a boat’s hull on waves rhythmically and unrelentingly interrupts his prose. It, specifically, was panned in a couple reviews I encountered. It made me nauseous to read; I thought it wonderful. It works for Wolfe, or it works from him.

In my own writing, elsewhere, I definitely suffer from imposter’s syndrome. Dorothy Parker, in her short story The Custard Heart compares a woman to a painting that looks impressive at a distance but less so upon close inspection. Parker does this in the same paragraph where she employs what starts out as a quatrain, but continues on for a line too long and unravels. It was delightful to read. If I had typed it out myself, I would dismiss it as a cheap gimmick.

And, what works for Fry, Wolfe and Parker is not entirely interchangeable.

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