Richard Nordquist / About.com

About 2,500 years ago, Socrates posed the question in Plato’s Phaedrus: “What, then, is the way to distinguish good writing from bad?” But as it turned out, he was just being a wise guy: the question was rhetorical. Hell-bent on discrediting the newfangled invention of writing, Socrates went on to argue that a written text, unlike speech, can only remind us of what we already know. “So it is with written words: you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say one and the same thing.”

We know this, of course, because Plato wrote the dialogue.

So despite Socrates’ objections, writing caught on–”big time,” as they never said in ancient Greece. And in the centuries since, teachers, editors, and writers themselves have tried to work out a reasonable answer to his rhetorical question: what does distinguish good writing from bad? And in what ways are good writers different from bad writers?

Here, with the hope of encouraging you to respond, are ten different answers.

• “A bad writer is a writer who always says more than he thinks. A good writer–and here we must be careful if we wish to arrive at any real insight–is a writer who does not say more than he thinks.”
  (Walter Benjamin, journal entry, in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938)
• “The difference between a good and a bad writer is shown by the order of his words as much as by the selection of them.”
  (Marcus Tullius Cicero, “The Oration for Plancius,” 54 B.C.)
• “There are bad writers who are exact in grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, sinning only through their insensitivity to tone. Often they are among the worst writers of all. But on the whole it can be said that bad writing goes to the roots: It has already gone wrong beneath its own earth. Since much of the language is metaphorical in origin, a bad writer will scramble metaphors in a single phrase, often in a single word. . . .

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