GrammarPhile Blog

What Makes a Writer "Great"?

Posted by Phil Jamieson   Mar 8, 2019 7:30:00 AM

Some people might argue that a “great” writer is someone who sells a lot of books or writes a lot of articles that are published in renowned magazines and publications. Or perhaps a great writer is someone who has a prominent and well-known social media account, or someone who writes about controversial topics and gets a lot of media attention, or someone whose writing is dubbed “classic” in the current literary canon.

You get the picture being painted here. There are a lot of ways one could identify or classify a “great” writer. But are those ways fool-proof, logical, or all-encompassing? It does seem each writer has his or her own specialty and strengths. So, do “great” writers have similar qualities or characteristics?

When you’re asked to provide an example of someone who is a great writer, who do you think of immediately? J. K. Rowling? Tom Clancy? Stephen King? Shakespeare? Robert Frost? Margaret Atwood? George Orwell? Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings? Ayn Rand? Mark Twain? Jack Kerouac? And if you were asked what you think makes him or her “great,” how would you respond?

Writers who are “great,” or at the very least are more widely known, do seem to have certain common characteristics, as listed below. Do you agree?

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Topics: writers

What You Need to Know About AI and Writing in the Digital Age

Posted by Kelly Creighton   Sep 13, 2018 7:30:00 AM

Ready or not, we’ve already begun living in the fourth industrial revolution: the age of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robots, biotechnology, and smart devices. And in this new era, a lot of individuals are becoming concerned that robots will start stealing and destroying jobs across industries, replacing their human counterparts, and that they’ll eventually run everything in the world … or at the very least change the way that everything operates.

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Topics: artificial intelligence, writers

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