Essay Writing: Beyond Good and Bad

Often in our writing, when we support something, we will say that it's good and when we disagree with something we will say that it is bad.  The thing is that good and bad don't really tell us anything.

For example,

I ask how you day was.  You say is was "good," or you say it was "bad."

I ask how that movie you watched the other week was.  You say it was "good" or you say it was "bad."

I ask you what you think about sterilizing those convicted on drug charges in exchange for a shorter sentence and you say it would be "good," or you say it would be "bad."

We can use the same words, but are your day, the movie, and the sterilization of drug addicts anything alike?  We need words that are going to be more specific that are going to communicate more what you have to say about the particular issue at hand.

So when we see the words good or bad in our writing, we want to try to replace them with something more communicative.  To do this, we need to ask ourselves, why was it good, or why was it bad?

If I write that my day was good, I ask, why was it good?  Because I didn't have a lot to do so I got to relax a bit.  Now I can say, my day was relaxing.  If I want to write that the movie was bad, I ask, why was it bad?  The acting was terrible and the plot was predictable.  So now I can write that the movie was predictable and poorly-acted.

So here's some writing practice:


Exercise
Directions: Take this paragraph on the article "How to Do One Thing at a Time."  Rewrite the body paragraph replacing the words "good" and "bad" with more specific language.  You may have to use more than one word.  You may even have to use a whole sentence.  The idea is to explain more specifically what the author is trying to describe about multi-tasking.

To begin with, multi-tasking is bad for us.  The article said that “when we attempt demanding tasks simultaneously, we end up neither as well as we should because our brains have cognitive limits.” In other words, when we try doing a lot of things at once, we don’t do a good job at any of them because we don’t have the brain power.  I can certainly relate to this because I multi-task a lot, and when I really think about it, I don’t know why.  Multi-tasking never really works out for me.  One time, I was trying to study for my history exam while watching TV.  They were giving this really interesting episode of Law and Order.  The episode was so good that I didn’t realize I wasn’t really paying attention to my history notes.  As a result, I got a bad grade on the test the next day.  Just like the article said, the brain cannot handle two things at the same time. I tried to study and watch TV at the same time, and I got a bad result.  It’s better to focus on what’s really important like your history exam.