Is quality of writing subjective, or objective?
When someone says that writing is good or bad, better or worse, is it merely a way to talk about whether something is popular, or interesting to you? Or is there more to it than that? Compare the two passages:
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats...
-From "The Stolen Child", by W. B. Yeats
and
The dog saw a frog
On a log in the bog.
I'm less interested in why Yeat's poem is technically better (unless your argument is that technical quality is the only objective measure of quality in writing). Rather, is there writing that is better or worse? Is it possible to quantify such a thing?
(Obviously, this will be seen by some as primarily opinion based - since I'm asking what exactly opinions are or should be based on.)
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/48907. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
2 answers
Writing is judged both objectively and subjectively.
Bad grammar, bad spelling, generic labels, clichés, etc can be objectively identified. Long passages of uninterrupted dialog can be objectively identified, long preambles without any action can be identified. Deus ex Machinas can be objectively identified, and explained. There is a reasonable chance a computer program can identify bad writing. A sophisticated and complex program, but using simple "if/then" programming, it doesn't have to be an artificial intelligence or quantum computer.
Much of bad writing is objective, and scientific: Don't do that, most readers don't like it, most agents and publishers don't like it, it just isn't popular.
On the other hand, most good writing is subjective. A computer program cannot tell you if the word choices in a poem combine to elicit an emotional response. They can't tell you if a newly imagined plot hook is compelling. They can't tell you if the actions you invent for your villain produce suspense or horror of sympathetic anger and grief with your MC. Computers cannot tell if a sex scene will be arousing to a reader, or painfully stupid, or laughable, or if it is too long, or if it is completely unrealistic. It takes human readers to judge whether your characters feel like real people to them, or feel like cardboard caricatures.
The same thing for jokes and humor. It takes a human. If you write scenes you hope are truly funny, there is no objective way to tell if they are. People laugh, or they don't, or they roll their eyes.
Breaking immersion is mixed; an anachronistic reference in an ancient setting can objectively break immersion, but some purple prose can also break immersion, as can an inappropriate word choice, and those can be subjective.
We can follow objective rules and logic to determine that something is bad writing.
But not to identify ALL bad writing, just because the grammar and spelling is good, and the dialogue is broken up with action or setting, and it doesn't use clichés, etc, doesn't make it GOOD writing. It can still be bad.
We cannot follow objective rules and logic to determine that something is good writing, and good writing can also overcome some of the technical gotchas that would normally classify something as bad. I've seen typos in great books, for example.
Good writing generates feelings, imagery, a sense of wonder. Those are all subjective judgments, there just is no rule for "this one line will make people want to cry," or "this line will make people laugh out loud."
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Any discussion of quality in art depends on your theory of what art is for. There seem to be two dominant theories of art today.
Theory: art creates an experience
In the case of literature, this means that reading the piece gives the reader an experience analogous in some way to an experience in real life. The "in some way" is an important qualifier here. How art works is a little mysterious. How is music an experience analogous to real life, for instance? We don't know, but it is. Literature seems to work by exciting the memory.
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
These lines call from memory images of rocky highlands dipping down to lakes, of leafy islands, and herons flapping their wings. Why exactly Yeats words are so much more evocative than my prosaic transcription is more than we know (or its more than I know, anyway). But Yeats' version is objectively better than mine because it produces a more vivid and moving experience than mine.
I say that Yeats version is objectively better, even though its quality depends on provoking a reaction in people and, since people differ, it will not produce this reaction consistently. But there is nothing subjective about the fact that a chemical produces a different reaction when combined with different other chemicals, and so there is nothing subjective about a good poem producing a different reaction in different readers. The difference in the reaction is caused not by varying quality of the literature but by the varying receptivity of the readers.
The objective quality of literature should be judged by its ability to create a profound experience for the most receptive of readers. That is an extremely difficult judgement to make, but it is, objectively, an objective one.
Theory: Art supports an ideology
In this theory of art, the value of a piece of literature is judged based on whether it supports the reader's ideology.
Major parts of the current literary establishment, for instance, condemn virtually the entire western canon as the product of patriarchy and oppression. It matters not in the least if some of that literature is capable of producing the most profound experiences: it is the produce of patriarch and oppression, or supports patriarchy and oppression, or it fails to condemn patriarchy and oppression in sufficiently explicit and modern terms.
The question of whether a piece of literature supports a particular ideology or not might be considered objective (though many such judgements are so crushingly lacking in subtlety and understanding as to be laughable).
The question of whether a piece of literature is good or bad under this theory of art is entirely subjective however, since it depends entirely on which ideology the reader believes in.
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