␡
- Define good writing yourself
- Bad writing: the whole sad story
- Good writing: a definition to live by
This chapter is from the book
Bad writing: the whole sad story
- Annoying "style" that interferes with the message
- Ambiguous
- Doesn't hold your attention
- Can't tell why you should care
- Makes the reader spend time figuring out the meaning
- Can't tell at whom it's aimed
- Repetitive
- Uninteresting word choice
- No detail to back up ideas or generalizations
- Vague
- Dense—no breathing room for reader to absorb information
- Pompous
- Connections between ideas and facts not clear
- No rhythm
- Stilted and awkward
- Rambles
- Full of clichés
- Too much—or too little—information to make the point
- Makes leaps, without helping reader to follow
- Feels passive
- Unconvincing—full of empty claims, unpersuasive
- Full of jargon of any kind—academic, scientific, business, and so forth
- Doesn't deliver what it promised
- Bad grammar and structure
- Misspelled words
- Incorrect word use