Good, Bad, & Ugly

When looking at examples of poor, good, and great writing, I often times have a hard time putting my finger on what falls in where. Most of what is read as a History major is primary sources accounts of some event or secondary sources, which are edited and checked by a group of peers.

Poor writing must be found then in the form of something an untrained writer would write or something that has no editing prior to publication.

This street sign may qualify as poor writing, simply because of the obvious message it sends. All jokes aside, writing must send a clear message and must be easy for the reader to read, while writing on a level appropriate for the audience.

Good pieces of writing are something that I would expect to find in a local newspaper, where, clearly, these people are talented in writing enough to have a job for just writing, but they are not necessarily creatively coming up with thick plots and three dimensional characters. They simply hear of events or items of interest and write about them.

The state's public schools have cut 8 percent of staff since 2008-09, losing at least 16,678 positions and laying off 6,097 people, according to new data from the state Department of Public Instruction.

Among the positions lost, 35 percent were teacher jobs and 33 percent were teacher assistant jobs.

It's the first time since the Depression that North Carolina schools have cut teacher positions during a time of enrollment growth, education officials said Wednesday.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/08/31/1450640/states-public-schools-have-cut.html#ixzz1Wfte4KrR

This leaves the last category of great writing. I would first like to distinguish that for writing in history, the level of writing may not involve as much creativity as Tolkien or Rowling used to create vast magical worlds, but rather that the writer can provide both enough information and, in more primary sources, vivid accounts capable of summoning an image of someone reading years afterwords.

"Joseph Montgolfier later said he had tried Lavoisier's 'gaz' unsuccessfully, but discovered the principle of hot air by watching his wife's chemise inflating when she hung it over the hearth to dry. He made several small experimental 'aerostats', finally adopting a pear-shaped balloon, with a wide neck that could be lowered over a fire. The Montgolfiers described it memorably as 'putting a cloud in a paper bag'.

-Richard Holmes, describing the invention of the hot air balloon from Chapter 3 of The Age of Wonder