I am becoming comfortable with the process of organizing my thoughts into an outline, reworking that outline until it is complete and capable of supporting a coherent sequence of thoughts, and then building a rough draft from that outline, before finally adjusting the rough draft and developing a final draft from it. I have a tendency to write sentences that are too long and complex, but I am working on that as well.
In my opinion, good writing starts out with having a thesis and building logical arguments and coherent points that support all the different elements of that thesis. Good writing must guide the reader from point to point in a logical and progressive manner that answers questions or addresses issues in the order that are likely to come up in the mind of the reader. Ideally, by the time a reader finishes a piece of good writing, he or she should have a clear understanding of exactly what the writer set out to convey and how each paragraph or section of the piece contributes to a conclusion tat flows logically from those points and leads to the restatement of the conclusion. I arrived at that conclusion by imagining myself as the reader, considering what the purpose of writing is (i.e. To convey a point-of-view), and thinking about what types of writing would be most helpful to me as a reader in that regard.
In my opinion, there are also obvious technical issues that distinguish good writing from bad writing, wholly apart from the logical coherence of the content. In that respect, I have in mind elements such as readability, appropriate use of language and vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. It is difficult to convey even the most logically valid position about anything if the structural and technical elements of writing mechanics are deficient. Writing that is unclear or that requires the reader to re-read passages...
In grade school) was a function of the overreliance on the technical descriptions of the parts of sentences. That is not to say that it is not important to construct sentences properly; but I am not sure that the best way to teach students to do that, (especially young students), is to spend so much focus on describing subjects and predicates and so forth. In my opinion, that approach to teaching writing reduces it to memorization and does not necessarily help the process of learning how to write as much as exercises in reading and writing that emphasize those same ideas but impliedly instead of explicitly.
As someone who has only very recently begun to realize that difficulty writing about literary themes in literary works that are not interesting or clear to students does not necessarily mean the same thing as difficulty writing, my impression is that educators should allow students to practice writing by allowing them much greater flexibility and latitude of subject matter. Perhaps English Literature studies should not be used as a means of teaching writing to the same extent as it has been in traditional American education. It might make more sense to allow students to choose their own topics of interest when they learn writing, precisely to ensure that the process of teaching and learning do not impose unnecessary barriers to learning how to write. Likewise, it might be a good idea to focus more on actually writing in grade school than on antiquated methodologies that turn writing lessons into memorization sessions of things that many students never appreciate in their intended context.
