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Bad Writers
Something We All Wonder About On Occasion... is why can't bad writers recognize themselves? That was the question sent in to Angela Hoy at WritersWeekly ezine. I knew exactly what the questioner meant, having seen innumerable examples over the years. Usually I'm approached (now electronically) by someone clutching their priceless prose to the breast, panting, "Would you just look at this and tell me what you think?" Luckily, discretion lurks within, and I seldom blurt out my first ideas. Hoy thinks these people continue trying because:
She suggests they join online critique groups to obtain honest assessments, but I think that's a time-waster. What they need is to pay a professional to edit or critique their work and tell them the truth. You get what you pay for and tend to value it the same. [editing] Listen to this article1. Like the singers on American Idol....some people really think they can write well when they can't. And, since family members will rarely tell them the truth, they just don't know how bad their writing is.
2. They may know their writing is poor, but they hope the editor at their future publisher's office will fix their errors.
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 9:23 AM
5 Comments:
"I'm not bad, I just write that way."
This sounds like a conversation ongoing on the Writer's Digest forum about The Da Vinci Code being a "good bad book". Some people think it's poorly written, but still a good book, as in, a good read. Obviously it's good in a commercial sense. So Brown must be a good bad writer?
I heard on NPR a year or two ago about a study that found that incompetent people lack the competence (or at least, critical thinking skills) to recognize their incompetence. That sounds about right to me. Certainly the gulf between what bad writers read and what they write shows a serious lack of analytical skills.
It's true that, as Julie recently wrote in her blog, teenaged writers in particular often surround themselves with other teenaged writers, whose idea of English is mostly text message coding. That doesn't help, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that bad writers need to pay someone to tell them how bad they are. For one thing, there are many predatory editors out there, and the terminally clueless may well gravitate toward those, who will praise almost anything for the right price. For another, bad writers may not believe even the true professional, because of that whole competency issue. The ones that do have a shot at learning to write better may also benefit from classes and the right beta readers. I learned a lot from writing and editing fanzines - and I like to think that the people who wrote for me learned something as well.
I think Karen's right on. The same thing happens in other professions, too. I'm an experienced software engineer, and occasionally the same question comes up about consistently incompetent software developers. You have to learn to be self-critical, to improve even your own learning process. But as they say, the first step is admitting you have a problem. As soon as you realize you have stuff to learn, you open up the way to learn. And as you learn more skills, these skills also enable you to spot your own deficiencies and thus to improve your skills even further. That's why it's important to be involved in critique groups that can tell you how you can improve your writing.
-TimK
I think you both may be on to something. I know it applies to the general context of the workplace that people overestimate their influence and expertise. But with writers, especially newbies who can't seem to understand how bad their writing is after repeated critiques, I wonder if other psychological processes are at work. Many fall in love with the idea of being An Author and are really disinterested in the work involved. They don't want to develop critical skills (popular buzzwords in academia these days) especially to apply to themselves.
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