Where does good writing come from? What are the causes of good writing?
I admit that as a younger person, I never gave this question much thought. I never needed to be motivated to write or told to strive to do it well, and I never thought about how other people did it. You might as well have asked me how I breathed.
In graduate school, I became a writing instructor of first-year college writing, with a stint as a writing consultant in the largest academic writing center in the world at the University of Texas at Austin. There this question slowly began to take shape in my mind. (A thrilling experience it was in the writing center, working with over 1000 student writers over four years, but a story for another time.) As I taught my students, good writing comes from understanding your audience, understanding what is being asked of you by the situation and meeting those expectations in language, which meant fashioning coherent sentences, paragraphs, and arguments.
You might immediately notice that my description privileges good writing mainly as a function of the writer, as evidenced by how the text, the product, conformed to certain standards.
But writers don’t operate in vacuums. Also, texts come in all sorts of shapes. My next lesson in this came during the go-go years of the dot-com boom (no, not that one; the one in the late 1990s), when a writing center colleague and I started a writing consulting business that exposed us to writing in business environments, which showed us that writing outside of academia merely needed to be mediocre to have purpose. It didn't have to excel. It merely had to be sufficient.
I also learned about accidental writers – people who just wanted to make deals, or design systems, or find things in microscopes, who then discovered that to advance in their fields, they had to write stuff as well. Some met this with dismay; others took up the challenge and flourished. Either way, making them into good writers required conscious thought and deliberate design. In the business context, it involved more than putting a dictionary at every desk and bringing in an English professor every quarter to give a seminar on punctuation. But what?
The boom fell to bust before we could get closer to an answer.
A revelation came from exposure to ideas in a new field. I found a job as a grants editor at the School of Nursing at UT-Austin, where one of the main research themes was “health promotion,” specifically for women with chronic diseases, like fibromyalgia or diabetes. I had always assumed that health simply meant the absence of disease in the body. But for people for whom disease was omnipresently life-long, health was still possible; it just took a different shape. The medical model, which works on individual bodies, seeks to prevent or eradicate disease. But the health promotion model, which works on bodies as well as social contexts, seeks to promote the causes of good health.
One could talk about writing in that way too. Writing, like health, is a process, not a product, an object, or an arrival. Being healthy is part of an entire lifestyle, part of where you live, what you eat, and your access to health care and support. Good writing is a feature of how individuals and organizations work, not just the specific pieces of writing they produce. Good writing is the result of a context where writers could have healthy relationships with texts, both as readers and writers. And not just a single text, but a lot of texts -- an ecology, if you will.
In other words, the causes of good writing are a lot like the causes of good health.
Sure, you focus on individual texts, just as you can’t let go of individual bodies. But you also have to pay attention to what the environments offer to those bodies. This led me to the insight: Good writing is a symptom of organizations where good writing happens, just like healthy bodies are a symptom of healthy environments. Where certain sorts of relationships are offered among writers, and among writers and texts, not in a single instance but across time.
Why do I focus on organizations? Because for accidental writers, those provide the exigencies for which they write: oversight, communicative needs vertically and laterally, knowledge production, dissemination. Non-accidental writers like me live and work in community, too, but they’re more often self-styled and chosen; these are looser networks with broader expectations. Yet they also need as much help (though a different sort) than accidental ones.
One example of promoting the causes of good writing: every year, the School of Nursing would hold a fellowship competition, awarding a prize to a student who submitted a winning essay. I remember asking to see the prompts for the essays, perhaps because someone had complained about the essay quality, and what do you know: the stated expectations for the essay on the front end didn’t line up with how the essays were actually reviewed. This means that any student who won did so by luck and happenstance, not because they consciously met the criteria. I encouraged the professors in charge of the competition to modify the prompts. Rejiggering the process made it easier for the reviewers to find the “good” writing they wanted to find.
Another example from my current institution: academic staff in the college where I work are supposed to write "personal development plans," an annual assessment of what they have done and where they'd like to go next. From the perspective of HR, this is "filling out a form" (the phrase they use), so barely counts as a writing task, much less a rhetorical one (I doubt HR staffers understand what that even means). But for academic staff, this can be a high-stakes document. Decisions about promotions and awards are made on the basis of the PDP. And yet who has ever seen an actual PDP? You don't learn how to produce them in graduate school, so it amounts to another part of the academic "hidden curriculum." Wouldn't this suggest there's a writing craft perspective to take on the PDP? To me, it does, but not to anyone else. You know what I have to conclude.
Back at the school of nursing job, I also held trainings and edited papers and grants–that was the job. Most of the professors had been practicing nurses before returning to research, and needed to get their academic literacy skills back. If left to their own devices, they wouldn’t have succeeded; the dean, who was keen on NIH money, wouldn’t have been able to hit her goals.
Here I learned that promoting the causes of good writing was something I could do more successfully in academic environments than business ones, and I have. The underlying business case was all about helping the organization make money and building expertise in-house (rather than farming the writing work out to consultants). What I really wanted to do was promote the causes of good writing.
I’ve tried many times to write this history, but only recently, when I discovered another term for “causes of good health,” or salutogenesis – and an unnecessarily fancy word, I might add – did this all come back to me, and I sat down to write. It also comes at a time when I have hit the limits of what I’m interested in doing in terms of research funding. I’m more interested in writing the proposals myself, rather than showing others how to do it. Sometimes I’m a writer, sometimes I’m a meta-writer, but mainly I’m a writer.
It also comes at a time when clearly many organizations, universities included, want to solve their writing problems through the application of generative AI. Are these systems a cause of good writing? They’re being used by non-native speakers of a language to produce grammatical texts. That’s a good thing, right? But people are also offloading many of the planning and discovery tasks to the machines, and that can’t be good.
And the organizations with a robust pedagogy for writing, and those with a strong pedagogical philosophy about what writing is for, and how to make good writers, will have fewer problems making sense of generative AI. At my current institution, I attended a meeting shortly after ChatGPT arrived, in which different professors got up to opine a startling variety of opinions and attitudes, some of them bad, about what writing was for. That's a mark of a place that's not committed to the causes of good writing.
