Sergio E. Blackaller English 1301.

90I Rhetoric and Composition October 5, 2011

Many people have different and various ideas of what good writing could be defined as. It involves great analytical and rhetorical thinking to at least touch the tip of the true answer. A typical answer might be one that explains all pieces of writing are perfect and errorless. That is a true misconception and fallacious argument. No piece of writing is ever going to reach perfection. A good piece of writing is when it reaches an ideal stage in which it involves great amount of thinking and making sure every argument is backed up by evidence or commentary. Grammar of course has a great deal in determining a great paper. Seeing a grammar error might discourage the reader of how great the paper is. Grammatical errors just show how careless the author really is. A careless author might be seen as a nincompoop who probably wrote about false claims since they didnt take their time to do their research. It is agreeable that for a good paper to be created, grammar has to be one-hundred percent error free. What doesnt have to be perfect in a piece of writing is the arrangement of ideas such as concrete details, commentaries and arguments. Ideas can be arranged and placed anywhere. The arrangement of ideas is infinite. One idea might be placed first and one last, or vice-versa. Since the placements of ideas are virtually endless, it makes it impossible for a paper to be perfect. Concrete details can be placed anywhere but do have to be followed by commentaries to support and carry on an argument. Commentaries can also be placed anywhere without affecting the effectiveness of a paper, but it does have to be placed within a specific concrete detail. A commentary can not be placed in a different

concrete detail that does not pertain to it; it will make the argument irrelevant and can possibly lose its effectiveness. Such case can be said not to be ideal. It is common for people to think writing methods help generate great essays. Many high school teachers implement writing methods to their middle or high school students which teach them to organize their ideas and be clear about them. Initially it is helpful, but these methods are limited to several writing situations above high school. It is simple enough to get a point across, but insufficient to elaborate a rhetorical statement. These methods steal the students creativity and make their writings similar to others. Writing methods are good at what they do; they do help generate acceptable and possibly ideal essays, but doesnt mean necessarily that they will help create ideal essays all the time. Long-ago, writing methods were hardly used and probably non-existent. Authors from the past were noticed for their elaborate thinking. These authors just wrote what they had in mind without being restricted due to a method. Thinking should not be restricted by a simple method, and it is preferably to write without a method since it lets the author write with out boundaries promoting good and well thought out pieces of writing. Aside from grammar and writing methods, putting rhetorical thinking into writing determines the greatness of a paper majority of the time. Rhetorical writing is harder to write than content writing, since rhetorical writing consists of great thinking. Rhetorical writing includes analysis, personal thoughts and experiences of a writer, while content writing consists of facts and information. Rhetorical writing also makes a piece of writing sound much more interesting than if it were just written in content writing. A person judges a piece of writing on how interesting the writing is. If they

think the writing was rather boring, they are going to say it was a bad piece of writing. A reader isnt just expecting solely information and facts. What the reader is looking for is the thoughts and ideas of the author over a certain topic, not just information and facts. Information isnt necessarily a bad thing, in fact, it helps structure a piece of writing, but rhetorical writing should be included along with content writing. If information isnt given, then the author has nothing to talk about, so information is as vital as rhetorical thoughts. The thing that separates a good writing from a bad one is that not enough rhetorical writing is given, making the piece of writing dull and uninteresting to the reader. There are requisites that determine and differentiate good and bad writing. Like most great papers, grammar has to be 100% correct. An error of that sort discredits the author. Writing should not be confined by writing methods which restricts thinking. Ideas such as commentaries are made up of rhetorical ideas that should be used often to elaborate a piece of writing. Rhetorical writing is essential to grab the readers attention. Because there are endless possibilities of writing and arranging rhetorical statements, they will never reach perfection, because what may seem perfect to someone may seem imperfect to another. Good writing therefore can only reach an ideal stage near perfection, a stage in which the majority agrees on a piece of writing to be good writing.