5 Unique Qualities of a Good writer

Key Points: Unique Qualities of a good Writer

Writing is an art. Differentiated qualities of a good writer can make this art presentable. Writing can also be seen as an important medium of communication that represents any language with symbols and signs. Some of the motivations for writing may include dissemination of ideas, imaginative narratives, business or personal correspondence, writing life experiences, and improvised additional capability for the shortcomings of human memory (Barbot et al., 2012). A good writer needs to possess a set of unique qualities in order to create an impressive piece of writing. This article is going to present some of the essential characteristics of a good writer.

1. Cognition and General Knowledge

Cognition and general knowledge factors are essential for developing writing skills. A quality writer must be aware of these factors, and should continuously strive to adopt these elements. These elements include verbal intelligence, topic knowledge, working memory (for recalling knowledge and information in a workable shape), inferencing based on evidence, and ability of a writer to draw logical information from factual details (Kellogg, 2008).

2. Discipline

To be a good writer, one must be capable of managing a frustration that is often caused during the process of required edits, re-writes, and improvements. Writers should develop a disciplined approach to writing to manage these issues. Great writers devote themselves to re-evaluate their work constantly, no matter how small their task is.

Good and credible writers focus on the craft and consistently work to get a better version of their own work through intense discipline (Badley, 2019). One should stick to his or her commitment and treat writing task as something extremely important. Writer’s first draft may not be that organized. So, a writer should take a break and get some space from the first draft before going for the edits. This habit can definitely bring improvements in the writing.

3. Motivational and Conative Elements

Many linguistic and literary experts have argued that intrinsic motivation is among the major conative aspects involved in developing creativity in quality writers. Intrinsic motivation is the element that represents the personal desire of a writer to express his or her thoughts and knowledge on specific subject through compositional activities.

Along with intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation is also a useful element in the writing process. Extrinsic motivation helps writers get through tough writing tasks. For example, motivators like the acknowledgement of someone’s writing, recognition of one’s work, and rewards (for example, best writing awards etc.) are among the extrinsic motivators.  A good writer is the one who makes use of intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivators to come up with an impressive writing draft (Magnifico, 2010).

4. Organized Thoughts

Executive qualities like planning and organization of ideas and thoughts are central to the process of writing. The quality writers must have the ability to sequence their ideas in order to present their narrative in a structured manner. Concentration is another quality that is required to be a good writer. Concentration focusses the attention of a writer on understanding the writing environment and managing constraints inherent to the writing tasks.

5. Literacy and Linguistic factors

Linguistic elements refer to the language skills at a basic level that help assemble words into a meaningful sequence. For meaningful writing, the writer must be capable of transforming ideas into a written form that requires linguistic skills of lower and higher level. The writer should use such words which may arouse the imagination and visualization of the reader through imagery.

Moreover, a good writer should ensure the usage of such vocabulary which develops creative expression in a written form. Thus a robust and strong vocabulary can be considered an asset to a quality writer (McKeough et al., 2007). In addition to that, a good writer should also possess the attributes of basic reading comprehension. Reading comprehension can be considered a receptive dimension of writing that is highly related to producing a creative piece of writing.

Sources

Badley, G.F. (2019). Post-academic writing: Human writing for human readers. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(2), pp.180-191.

Barbot, B., Tan, M., Randi, J., Santa-Donato, G. and Grigorenko, E.L. (2012). Essential skills for creative writing: Integrating multiple domain-specific perspectives. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 7(3), pp.209-223.

Kellogg, R.T. (2008). Training writing skills: A cognitive-developmental perspective. Journal of writing research, 1(1).

Magnifico, A.M. (2010). Writing for whom? Cognition, motivation, and a writer's audience. Educational psychologist, 45(3), pp.167-184.

McKeough, A., Palmer, J., Jarvey, M. and Bird, S. (2007). Best narrative writing practices when teaching from a developmental framework. Best practices in writing instruction, pp.50-73.