Good and Bad Writing

Bad:

Ex1.) In this example the author made this paragraph exceptionally wordy. He begins he thesis with a truism or two by stating that at some point in time someone was able to prove that there are individuals in our society. He then goes on to repeat some variation of the word "relativism" over, and over in a series of rhetorical questions. He makes it difficult to decipher his thesis by saying way more than he needs to.

Ex2) This is a good example of an author trying to sounds clever. They manage to talk a lot, yet say very little. I believe the message they're trying to get across is Systems ability to communicate effectively is important to improve our service. This clearly is a very ironic message hidden in this jumbled run on sentence.

Ex3) While not as wordy as the first two examples, this paragraph could definitely still be trimmed down to make the authors purpose clearer. In addition, the final paragraph states that the author had "proven" religion does not fill the gap of a parent which has been lost". Such a statement is an opinion and cannot be proven to be true or false. It is simply a point of view, not to be taken as truth. So in this sense the author is lying to their audience.

Good:

Ex1) This paragraph is brief, but tells the audience what needs to be known. It clearly describes the process of "The Spawning of The Capelin" while not using words that the intended audience (in this case it would be people with an interest in the sciences) would not be familiar with.

Ex2) This paragraph is similar to the first in the respect that it effectively communicates it's purpose without being overly wordy. They compare colors to smilies with a quotation that then leads to the question of how one distinguished colors. This lets the audience know the purpose early on, and conscider it throught the rest of the paragraph. In "bad paragraph three", they do the exact opposite, by stating their purpose at the end.

Ex3) This paragraph also begins by stating the authors purpose at the begining. After the question "Can machines think" is posed, they go on to make the distinction (or lack of distinction) between humans and machines. This the leads to their main question of "can a machine think just by implementing a computer program". This is very clear and not overly complicated or wordy. It is a nice way of describing the idea or artificial intelligence without becoming too wordy.

The audience is essently what dictates if the writing is good or bad. In all these cases the writing is trying to communicate a point of idea to the audience. The goal is to communicate this as clearly and effectively as possible without hiding this purpose in such a vivid description. If you know your audience is going to be nearly everyone, you will want to use basic language and make everything as clear as possible, thus holding back on anything not absolutely necessary. It is up to the author to evaluate his audience and write something that will get them to understand exatly what they need to understand with as little work as possible. In the "bad" examples you almost had to decode the paragraph to understand what exactly they were trying to say. In the "good" examples, it was always very apparent.