Please consider the following paragraph:
I am going to proceed based on the assumption that although the different identity groups that I analyze in my research, as well as many others, undoubtedly exist in the objective reality, any attempt to define them in terms of a shared characteristics that are assumed to be applicable to any member of the group allows to speak of these groups as ‘imagined communities.’ Now, the question arises regarding the reasons of why I consider that literary texts, and specifically novels of the above-mentioned period, will be particularly helpful in working out a definition of a term that seems to belong more to social sciences, especially given the fact that sociologists do not seem to be able to provide a clearer definition of this concept.
How do you feel about it? Now imagine reading an entire article or a book written this way. Scary, huh?
I’m almost too ashamed to confess that this is my writing. I wrote this eight years ago and felt uncommonly proud of my writing style. If you know anything about my personality, you probably realize why people were terrified of telling me how much my writing sucked. Finally, a brave friend downed a few drinks and found the courage to tell me that my writing was bad. The poor guy’s hands were literally shaking and he was speaking in a small, terrified voice.
At first, I thought he was simply being mean. Then, however, I stopped to think about it. Was it possible that my writing wasn’t as amazing as I believed it to be? In order to lay these doubts to rest, I asked another friend whose writing style everybody praised for its elegance to show me her work. She refused for a while because, as I now understand, she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Finally, she gave in, and I got a chance to read her work.
I might have been a sucky writer but I was a good reader. This is why I immediately realized that my friend’s writing was vastly superior to mine. As a result, I embarked on a journey to find out what it meant to write well in English and develop my own writing style.
In the second installment of this post I will share the principles of good writing that I have established for myself. Please understand that it is normal for people to have different approaches to good writing, so none of these rules need to be set in stone. As long as people love reading your stuff, you are fine. My problem was that nobody wanted to read the crap I wrote precisely because it was crap.
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