RWS 305W Prof Vanderpot 8/10/2012

The Art and Science of Writing

In a society filled with complexities, communication plays a very important role. Of the forms of communication, writing is considered as an effective medium to express ones ideas, beliefs, and even emotions. In fact, this written form of communication has been very useful to us since time immemorial. Through writing, one can be himself or can go beyond his perimeters. Writing can be very complex where the real meaning can be gleaned within the writing. In this case, the reader has to analyze the reading in its entirety. On the other hand, writing can also be simple and direct where the meaning can be gathered from the very word or the writing itself. Indeed, in writing there is freedom of expression and liberty of mind. With the freedom of expression, a writer may use different forms of writing. There are several characteristics or elements that all forms of writing share and there are as many forms of writing as one can think of. Writers come up with new writing techniques all the time. However, despite such freedom and wide parameter, a good writer must not lose sight of some basic characteristics in writing. A good writer ought to consider how to make the reader relate and comprehend his writings. One of the basic characteristics of what can be considered good writing is description. In this style of writing, the writer conveys his ideas by trying to create pictures in the minds of the readers. Moreover, a writer should also relate his writing to known events in society. This is a way to catch readers attention and interest. The writer should also write the story in a form in which it gives the reader the point of view of a character and therefore the reader becomes part of the story through the character. In addition, the language style use in the story should be medium level where there are complex words but the reader does not become lost in the meaning of the words. Lastly, the writing

style should be of a story like type where the focus of the story is on its main subject or problem and there are not too many side stories that do not add up to the main story. Description is one of the fundamental parts about writing, that a good writer should know. Writing can be a pretty difficult task since the writer is trying to transmit an idea through the use of words. A good writer has to be careful with word choices since each person has slightly different ideas in their mind of what a word means. The writer can use the word airplane and be thinking about a passenger airplane, while the reader can be thinking about a fighter airplane, the same word can convey to different ideas. This is why description plays a major role in the development of good writing. The writer has to be able to describe and put a picture in the readers mind of what exactly the writer is thinking about. The authors goal is to be able to pass his/her idea into the readers mind and the only way to do that is by describing every single detail that the writers idea contains. A good example of this kind of writing can be seen in the novel Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury. The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws. (97) This emphasis in description makes the reading more vividly and more enjoyable, since one can picture the words in his/her mind. Relating the writer ideas to current events or important events in history is also a good

writing technique. The writer should be up to date in current events that are happening in the community and how they can be used to help transmit the writers idea into the readers mind. A good writer would be able to relate his or her ideas to common knowledge events in order to help the reader create a better picture of what is exactly the real purpose of the reading. A good writer should not make reference to events that are only known to a small group. By doing this, it would leave out groups of people that are not aware of such events. This will leave the reader clueless and can provoke the reader to lose interest in the writing because the reader cannot picture in his/her mind what the author is trying to tell. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan (Fahrenheit 451, 8). In this quote we can see how Ray Bradbury writes about book burning, throughout his story Bradbury makes parallelism between the NAZI ideologies and the ideologies of the society in his story. Doing this parallelism allows the readers to understand in a more deeply way the idea that the author is driving up. Since most readers are aware of the NAZI ideologies and agree that such ideologies are destructive of the free thinking, this combines well with the main point of the story which is related to how people are giving up their freedom and becoming a mindless body. Fahrenheit 451 represents a good example of how a writer can relate his/her idea to a known event and he does this no in a direct way but rather in an implicit way leaving it open for the reader to make the connections and making the reader a more active participant. Another good technique is writing the story from the point of view of the characters or main character. This will allow the reader to feel part of the story and becoming more engage in the reading. For example With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black (Fahrenheit 451, 3). The point

of view of this quote is from Montag perspective which is the main character of the story. Using this type of writing helps the reader visualize what is going on and it incentives the reader to continue reading. Using this type of technique will help the reading be more manageable since the reader is assuming the persona of the character through which he/she sees the story. The writing level should be keep at a medium high, where there is a level of complexity in the words use, but this complexity does not undermined or distracts the reader from the main idea of the story. Sentences should be composed of mix level words where the meaning of a word can be recognized by analyzing the whole sentences. Using this type of technique allows readers with different educational background to read the story. It would also encourage reading since it allows to reader to keep up with the story without getting bug down by definitions of words. In Fahrenheit 451 We are stopped and searched occasionally, but theres nothing on our persons to incriminate us. The organization is flexible, very loose, and fragmentary (152). There are words that might be complex or unknown for younger readers. However, the meaning of the whole sentence still intact and allows the reader to continue with the reading without becoming frustrated because of lack of understanding. Finally the story should have a format with a beginning and end, where the reader can look back at the story and see the main idea behind it. This type of technique will allow the reader to analyze what was the objective of the story, whether the main idea was explicit or implicit. Stories that differ too much from the main story tend to make the reader lose concentration and interest in the story, since they cannot keep track of what is going on the story. A writer should avoid as much as possible changing the subject of the story. In Fahrenheit 451 we can see how the author writes about the daily life in this society and how he writes about houses burnings, books burnings, and people with noise devices in their ears, bloodhound devices, etc. the author writes about different

ideas but all of these ideas are related to the main point and lets the reader keep in track of the main idea. This is an import characteristic of good writing because if the reader loses interest in the reading, the reader probably will not read a story from the same author again. Good writing techniques are what defines if a book is successful or not, regardless of the authors fame. Every good writer should also be a good reader. The writer has to be able to get into his/her readers mind and see what would motivate his/her readers to be engaged in the reading. There might be several writing techniques and each writer might add up his/her own style to the writing but every good work will have the basic techniques. These techniques are description, relation to known events, point of view from the characters perspective, a mix language level, a format with a beginning and end that allow reader recognize main idea. The writer that best combine these techniques with the ones of its own would be successful writer, and will appeals to the vast majority of the reading community. This is why Fahrenheit 451 appears to me as a well writing book, since it gave me, a nonreader of books the inspiration to keep going and finish it, that being the first book that I actually read from beginning to end.