What is Good Writing?

A funny thing happened in the course of my last post: I committed the same error I was complaining about: putting readability before rigor.

In an earlier version (this is where the problems began, perhaps: fussing over it too much) I had a lengthy excerpt from Seth Godin’s excellent post. In the process of making my post more readable I ended up cutting his — and cutting a corner — by excerpting the part of Bruce Nussbaum’s post that happened to have the best bit of Godin’s…

Convenient, readable… imprecise. [Seth pointed out the error himself.]

The last time I got busted trying to streamline something like that, Richard Florida corrected me for saying “the original hipsters were known as white negroes”:

Well, almost…

The kicker is that I actually spent an abnormally long time composing that sentence (I got up and walked around for a bit), trying to make it as readable and unfussy as possible. In the end I sacrificed accuracy for ease, choosing a quick gesture rather than a more cumbersome description.

So despite my apparent hostility towards the popular style, I can be just as susceptible to its errors as anyone. In fact, being more widely read and enjoyed is something I aspire to.

And why wouldn’t it be? Which is worse: popularity or pedantry?

For every negative remark about “dumbing down” there is a corresponding complaint about “awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose.”

Sometimes I worry that Malcolm Gladwell and J.K Rowling are lowering readers’ tolerance for challenging books, but it could likewise be argued that they are keeping books alive and raising the standards of readability.

Which is it? How do we work it out?

We could propose a kind of compromise by saying that good writing (good non-fiction writing, at least) balances readability and precision: good writing is about finding a sweet spot between the two.

Then the problem is that we all — both as writers and readers — have different sweet spots. One person’s perfection is another person’s pandering — and yet another person’s pedantry.

But having a different sweet spot is no excuse for bad writing — whether it errs on the side of pandery or pedantry. Even the most popularized prose should still be precise, and even the most technical prose should be readable — as difficult as the balance may be.

Now it occurs to me that balance isn’t the right metaphor. Good writing isn’t about “so-much-of this on one side + so-much-of that on the other.”

It’s really only about one thing: good editing.

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Tagged as: academics, blogging, editing, malcolm gladwell, pandering, pedantry, popularity, precision, richard florida, seth godin, writing