It’s no surprise that it’s far easier to discover bad writing rather than it is to find good writing. Many pieces out in the world are “good” and “bad” objectively speaking. But, when we search for “good writing,” we’re looking for stand-out writing, something perhaps even exceptional.
In my Writing 102 course in my freshman year of college, I was fortunate to have a professor who was, in fact, doing her job properly. She instructed the class to go out and seek out “good writing” that was actually good. This involved taking note of some number of “good writing” examples; I believe it was ten. We then needed to form some points by which we validate what makes “good” and “bad” writing to us.
Naturally, as this was 2005, I began my search for such stand-out writing on the Internet. I simply pointed my browser to Google and typed in “great essays” as a search string. The first link that popped up was to a site labeled “Must-Read essays” with links to essays on all sorts of different topics. While this is long gone by the time I’m revisiting this assignment, I did find these Must-Read Essays through Internet Archive.
The first essay on that site that I read wasn’t exactly an essay; rather it was a transcript of a conversation by Courtney Love regarding the music industry. It was an interesting piece, but not actually writing, so I didn’t consider that one. At the time, I didn’t find any of the other “essays” to fit the idea of “good writing” as I interpreted it then, so I went elsewhere. In retrospect, though, there is some very interesting stuff here to peruse.
I then jumped into our textbook at the time, the Norton Reader, as my instructor suggested it was a good source for finding good essays to read. I was browsing the index when something on page 779 caught my eye, “The Death of Abraham Lincoln” by Walt Whitman. We’d been reading him in my Pathway class, so I thought I’d check it out. He begins by describing the first time he’d ever seen Abraham Lincoln in person in great detail.
During this encounter in New York City, as he describes it, Abe Lincoln is walking down the sidewalk and the crowd is almost dead silent. As Whitman tells it, Lincoln wasn’t overly popular in New York City. But to be received with a “sulky, unbroken silence” seems strange to me. It paints a picture in your mind what things were really like for Abe. Whitman shows us through his words just how unpopular Lincoln was at the beginning of his Presidency, how almost everyone in the crowd seemed ready to start a riot, but no one did. I found it to be a very good piece of writing, for all the issues that I have with Whitman.
Skimming through the table of contents, on 880 and 882, I saw listed two really short essays, both called “Democracy,” that I thought sounded interesting. They were short, one by Carl Becker, and a tiny one by the great E.B. White. I liked them both, naturally, as they are about one of my favorite topics.
A little time later, I opened up the Norton Reader again right to a piece on page 20 called “The Town Dump” by Wallace Stegner. I found it a very interesting piece. I don’t remember what it was about now, but I do recall it was a good piece of writing. Feeling a little scientific, on pg. 634, I read Carl Sagan’s “The Abstractions of Beasts.” It was interesting. At the time, it was a little too scientific for me. I need to reread this sometime…
I went back on the Internet and again searched for “Great Essays.” Skipping down a few links I clicked on one that was labeled “Great Essays to Read for FREE.” I tracked it down, once again on Internet Archive: The Essays Now Depot. I asked myself, “Wouldn’t that be the purpose of searching for essays online, to read them for free?” It seems rather silly that people would have to pay to read great essays. Oh, how naïve I was…
I clicked on the first one on the list. It was called “The First Day of School” by Earl Roberts. It was by a father writing about his young son’s first day of school. I found it very moving. I never thought I’d ever see a father’s view of their child’s first day and everything going through his mind. It was very touching. I would later decide that it was my favorite piece of them all. It was beautifully simple, but so thoughtful and profound. I loved it. Weirdly enough, that is no longer found at the link that was archived. It’s a shame I can’t find it today.
On Talewins.com I also read, “The Artist Within” by Eileen Bergen, “The Web” by Lin Stone, “A Break from Boredom” by Lance Nalley, and “The Moon on Six Pence” by Lin Stone. These four essays don’t appear in the archived version, although there are a couple pieces by Stone there and another from Lance Nalley.
I read some essays by this man named Doug Wahl. He wrote some good stuff. Unfortunately, his website, Going to Write, is a casualty of the two decades since. Among the titles of his that I read are “Discarding Friends” and “A Flawless Definition of Love.” For the final essay of this assignment, I decided to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Friendship,” a classic essay. This is another one I need to read again.
Through my search I came up with four points that I feel a piece must have to constitute good writing: it must have a purpose; it must say something interesting; good grammar; good flow to the essay; and the piece cannot bore the reader to death with long-windedness. I think these are good points, but more importantly, I’d add these three aspects to “good writing:” it has to be honest, say something interesting that makes you pause, and lead to some unexpected realizations in the end.
For my “Bad Writing” sample, I followed the advice of a blog whose author said that this was the worst writing she’d ever seen. I would have to agree with her. (This isn’t in Web Archive, but the sample is.) The sample in question is a review of the film Pirates of the Caribbean. The structure of many of the sentences is awkward. The whole thing reads as something even a fourth grader would be ashamed to turn into his teacher. I still agree with my initial assessment, but I have seen so much worse in the years since, and I don’t want to shame this person.
Overall, this was a good assignment because it made me think about what “good writing” actually is. Of course, being just out of high school and still incredibly naïve, I didn’t recognize a lot of the good writing I stumbled across. Sure, it wasn’t flashy or elegant as E.B. White, but good writing is straightforward and tells a story worth telling, and there’s quite a few in those archived links. I put this together in order to preserve some of this experience for at least awhile longer, because honestly, I have a really hard time finding “good writing” anymore. That meaning, something I haven’t already heard parroted a hundred times already.
~ Amelia Desertsong
