| > How could I know what was good if there was no objectively right answer? Except there usually is a right answer, only it tends to be buried under several layers of “how do you want this to be interpreted?” The one thing I have learned about writing is that the same sentence can have wildly different interpretations between people if it’s written sloppily enough. Your core meaning could still very well be there, but because the prose was sloppy, it opened the door to alternative interpretations that you cannot control. Now sometimes there is no way to refine it further. But most of the time it can be. And then, even after sharpening the prose, you need to take your reader into account. What works for an adult might not work for a teenager. When I was a kid, I remember having a doctor in the hospital ask me if I was nauseous, and I replied, “there is nothing wrong with my nose”. I had never come across that word before, and associated the sound that went into its pronunciation with the closest other word I knew - the word for nose. The doc had failed to take into account people with a more limited vocabulary, setting up a chance for medical misinterpretation - I had indeed been sick to my stomach, but because he didn’t ask about it in those simpler words, he almost didn’t learn about it. Writing is even more bereft of context, and so you need to not only sharpen the prose to cut off undesirable paths of interpretation, but also write for what your audience knows. And sometimes this can be one hell of a rabbit hole in of itself. |