Writing Is Reading Essay

Have you ever had someone spell out to you what good writing really is? It seems as though most people have these common perceptions that good writing has to be logical, easy to follow, free of grammatical errors, etcetera, but have you ever had someone show you otherwise? Let’s talk about probably one of the greatest movies of last year, “Inception”. This movie was the most non logical, hardest movie to follow that people had ever seen, and yet they loved it. Now take some time to think about who made that movie… a writer.   This writer wanted to confuse his audience and wanted to make a different and interesting film, and in my opinion, he succeeded tremendously.
So what about academic writing? Think about writing an essay in college and what makes it great for your professor. Most people have the same guidelines as I outlined previously, however, my goal is to show you that academic writing doesn’t have to be so black and white. For example, a great writer can get away with grammatical errors because their message intrigued their audience so well. A man named Joseph Williams better exemplified this by saying that as readers, we usually only find errors when we are looking for them. Basically, he is saying that the only thing separating published and non-published, student writings is that one audience is reading for fun and the other is reading for errors.
Think back to when you were in college and you were assigned a term paper or research project and the professor gave you specific guidelines to follow. Maybe you followed those guidelines to a T, but there was that one person in the class that the teacher just had to read their essay aloud and you think your paper is nothing close to it. Everyone knew that was the student who was great at writing, but why couldn’t everyone else be on that level. When my class was asked what makes good writing almost all replied with it has to be structured, grammar free, and has to have good mechanics. I’m challenging...