DHM Confidential Vol. #1

Welcome to DHM Confidential (Vol. #1), a new series for paid subscribers. Thank you for your long and continuing support! In addition to the free weekly newsletter, I’ll be occasionally adding a shorter form missive1 on the week’s newsletter or something else in publishing, art, or life. I’ll try to break my own self-imposed writing rule for good essay writing and use “I” more to keep things a bit more casual. Here goes…

This week I made the somewhat provocative statement that “No One Knows What Good Writing Is.” I joked in one of the footnotes that voters might prove this statement wrong depending on how they judged a few writing samples. However, I was pleasantly surprised to be…completely right.

Readers roundly voted on nine sentences and paragraphs from incredibly well-respected books and authors as mostly passable or actively bad. The best rating any of the writing samples received was a 50% “good” rating (shoutout, as always, to Jen Beagin). These results proved a bit of a hypothesis. The poll results, reactions, and reader commentary gave me a few extra thoughts on the three ways I pointed out that readers are subconsciously judging what good writing is. It also made me consider, in contrast, what is bad writing and what exactly are most readers taking for granted?