Because no writer has the patience to sit through a grammar class...and no reader wants to read wordy, confusing writing no matter what the topic.
/shameless plug
Beautiful article though. I've met a couple recently-turned full-time authors and have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the author/artist life. It's such a lifestyle sacrifice that their love for the craft must be incredibly deep.
It repeatedly returns: “Your response seems incomplete, so we set your score to the length of the original sentence. If we're mistaken, please drop us a line with a screenshot of this screen”, without any indication of how to fix the solution to be acceptable. I suppose it’s fishing for some specific keywords?
It doesn’t seem to have any full natural language model or conceptual model of the idea of the paragraph, so it can’t point out awkward or confusing phrases.
The proposed “par” and “record” sentences are not especially clear or elegant prose, or even especially short for conveying the ideas in the paragraph, and the metric (fewest characters used) is in general a weak heuristic for clear writing. The prompts don’t offer any list of essential vs. superfluous information, or even an explanation of the paragraph’s context and audience, so a proofreader/rewriter has to guess precisely what the author needed to say, and what the appropriate tone/style is.
I ultimately don’t understand how this game teaches writing any better than just trying to rewrite random sentences found in a book. Or for that matter, just having an email conversation with a friend about some random topic.
You're right that it's crude, lame even. That's why I dragged my feet on releasing it for weeks. But if you're getting the incomplete message, chances are your response is actually incomplete. We've had over 7,000 submissions and only 2 issues so far. Feel free to send me an example at steve at writeonpar dot com...I'm curious why you keep seeing that.
Writing is subjective. Your idea of elegant prose is different from mine, especially when context isn't specified.
I'll concede the game is more of a tool to practice good grammar & clarity than a way to teach it, but I don't agree that it's no different from rewriting random sentences in a book.
The par/record sentences are helpful for a lot of people. The timer is a simplistic but effective way to create mental pressure. And when we add videos explaining the journey from lousy to concise, players will actually learn the reasons for lousiness and techniques for clarity.
And, consistent practice trumps everything. Strange as it is, I've tried to pick examples that make the game less boring than any class/book/lecture you'll find anywhere. The result: this tool helps a number of people consistently practice writing better...something that wasn't otherwise happening.
Yes, the context being the important thing.
Creative writing is somewhat subjective, but other fields have more established conventions. The style Joyce uses for the Ulysses' final chapter would not be appropriate in an instruction manual. Even if we don't deal in absolute rights and wrongs, we certainly have established conventions for things that are right and wrong in defined contexts.
I taught an English 150 course, Technical Writing for Engineers, and can testify that the conventions can be taught and learned. Also, some students can understand and execute the principles better than others!
Yup. I began with the goal of helping business writers (mainly marketers). Even that's subjective, but we're doing what we can.
Creative writing is a totally different beast.
This tool allows a player to see a colon being used, wonder why, learn why (explanatory videos coming soon), and then use the colon in practice.
Learning by doing is much more effective than learning theory, in my opinion.
Regarding Bukowski, you should check out his Wikipedia page. I'll snip some highlights, and draw some conclusions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski
> poet, novelist, and short story writer
> Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books
You don't write thousands of poems without understanding language. He may not have had a complete collegiate education, but you can be sure he ended up studying language on his own.
[0]: I exclude the compulsory educational curriculum of childhood here. I've never personally known a writer who bothered to study grammar, particularly in such a manner as would have ever been a burden.