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...
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