What makes good writing?#

It depends. It depends on what the goal of your writing is. Are you writing a manual? Are you writing a novel? What is the purpose of your writing?

Good writing should follow a logical structure. Most of the things we write convey some kind of information whether it be stories or how to make a cake. Although recipes generally benefit from a concrete structure and unexpected twists and turns and non linear writing make a story interesting, in the end one should have a finished product, which is logically constructed and understandable as a whole picture.

Another characteristic for better writing is grammatical correctness and figuring out how to turn on the autocorrect feature in nvim. Whenever I read something and notice spelling or grammatical errors, I subconsciously evaluate the writing based on it’s grammar rather than the quality of the arguments it makes.

In a similar vein to logical structure and purpose, it’s nice to stay on topic while writing. This just makes sure that you have your thoughts in place and are focusing on the task at hand while writing. When writing to lay out your opinions, it’s important to write them out one at a time. The challenge here is to be able to organize the thoughts in your head and not forget them while writing. This is one of the reasons why writing is so good for thinking, as it requires you to focus and to actively structure and organize your thoughts. The act of putting your thoughts into words also makes your thoughts clearer.

Reading what you’ve written is one of the best ways to improve writing. It allows you to correct any mistakes you made. It is also something that I don’t enjoy doing. The correction process requires finding mistakes. It requires being honest. It breaks the illusion of being a great writer by showing you every mistake you made.

Taking the idea of noticing mistakes and correcting them even further, an even better way to improve would be to let others read what you wrote. If nobody reads what you wrote, there’s room for improvement.

Finally, the best writing is writing that exists. Having written something takes you one step closer to being better than having written nothing. Just like any other thing in life, writing is a skill that needs to be actively developed through the process of trial and error.