It’s no surprise to anyone when I say I love words… which obviously means I also love books.
And if you’re a fellow book fan, you’ll probably know that this year’s Booker Prize shortlist was announced on Tuesday.
With it, the same question gets asked each year: what makes writing good?
Bad writing is much easier to spot.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it rambles on long after the point has been made or doesn’t give you enough to understand the point in the first place. And then there are the things you notice immediately like a typo or a factual error.
Good writing is harder to pin down.
The Booker judges will have their own ideas. So will critics, authors and the fans (and haters) in the Goodreads reviews.
The writing we work with at Accuracy Matters is a long way from literary fiction but we still spend a lot of time thinking about what makes writing work.
So, while everyone is talking about it in the context of the Booker, we thought we’d share what it looks like to us.
It does its job
There has to be a point to it.
Take The Disappearers by Marlon James, one of this year’s Booker longlisted books. It follows eight gay men rehearsing a play in 1980s Jamaica and the aftermath of a violent homophobic attack. There’s a story being told, but the book is also confronting something much bigger.
The writing has something it wants to communicate.
The same principle applies to all writing.
An annual report isn’t there for the sake of having an annual report. There is something the reader needs to understand or take away from it.
If that point gets lost, it doesn’t really matter how polished the sentences are.
It doesn’t make the reader do unnecessary work
Reading takes some effort. The writing doesn’t need to add more.
A writer can ask a lot of a reader and plenty of brilliant books do. But there’s a difference between making someone think and making something unnecessarily difficult to follow.
That distinction matters in the work we do too.
The reader might already be dealing with a complicated subject. Their attention should be on understanding that, not working out what a sentence means or going back three paragraphs because they’ve lost their flow.
Good writing helps them along, rather than making them fight their way through it.
It says what it means
Writing can be perfectly correct and still dodge the point.
We see this when something has been written around so many times that the straightforward version has disappeared. Extra wording creeps in. Necessary context is cut. The thing the reader really needs to know gets harder to find.
Being clear about what you mean isn’t the same as being blunt.
It’s making sure the reader comes away knowing what you intended them to know.
Clear and simple aren’t the same thing
We talk a lot about making writing simple.
Most writing benefits from losing the filler. But the answer isn’t always to make everything shorter. Some subjects genuinely need explanation.
Cutting that explanation because “simple is better” can make the writing less useful.
Clarity is about giving the reader what they need to understand the point. That may take two sentences instead of one.
It should be enjoyable...
Even if you’re writing something nobody is going to curl up with on a rainy afternoon!
You can feel when writing has become monotonous. Sentence after sentence lands in exactly the same way and the language feels stiff. You understand it, but your attention starts wandering.
Good writing has a natural pace to it. A longer thought can take a longer sentence. A simple point doesn’t need dressing up.
That variation makes a big difference to how something feels on the page.
It still sounds like someone wrote it
Editing should make writing better. It shouldn’t polish away everything that made it sound human in the first place.
If a sentence is already clear, does its job and sounds right for the person or organisation speaking, there may be nothing to fix.
Good editing involves knowing when you’ve done enough.
It’s correct
Correct spelling and grammar won’t rescue bad writing but mistakes can undermine a good piece very quickly.
And accuracy goes beyond proofreading. Figures need to match. Names need to be right. Information needs to hold up from the beginning of the document to the end.
If readers start noticing things that don’t add up, they start questioning the rest of it too.
So what makes good writing?
The Booker judges have their take and we have ours.
What makes the question so interesting is that there is no single answer.
What does good writing mean to you?
