Recognizing Excellence in Writing

It took me approximately 1 hour to get through the first Twilight novel by Stephanie Meyer, and felt I should gouge out my eyes with a broach to adequately mourn the time wastefully spent skimming through page after page of trashy cliches and basically poor prose. In contrast, I spent 2 delicious hours savoring each word in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a deeply beautiful novel that also caused me to mourn: not for time ill spent, but for the end of something so exquisite, so poignant and so beautiful that I wished to always be reading it. It is not ironic that I should so happily spend double the time reading a book of only half the length of Twilight:  it is simply the difference between good and poor writing.

Shakespeare is a fantastic standard in the English language for good writing. He unceasingly employs creative and exacting poetic devices that elevate his writing in a continuous upward transcendence. He does use cliche, but not generally speaking, and not as a fall-back tool of the trade. No. The Bard is much better than that.

Students, too, can learn to be better writers than a New York Times bestselling author! Student writing can be monotonous to read when poorly done, but it also can be a fantastic experience when students rise to the occasion and produce quality work.  I have noticed, while reading student essays, that a few always cause me to to pause and read a little slower. They make me think, and they have a funny sort of beauty, too. They use delicate and sometimes intricate figurative language, and they are rhetorically sound. Writing is nothing more than communication: the attempt of a thinker to transmit his or her thoughts to another. It is immediately apparent to a reader how much thought fueled the writing. The craftsmanship of the figurative language, the complexity of the thoughts, and the poetry of the two fused together make good writing unmistakable.