Bill's Notes

Communication.

Performance is nothing but entertainment.

agreeing with super G.

pure transmission of information is math. Or, yeah, technical manuals.

If you're not doing one of those - then you have to take your audience into account -and your audience (being human) is a fickle, easily distracted animal with a short attention span and poor powers of retention. You have to pick your words to get their attention, engage them and then have exactly the desired impact.

Good fiction requires practice, skill, and creativity (at least for fiction). Some of the skill can be learning in writing classes, though that doesn't guarantee good writing. Since good writing encompasses a set of learned techniques, it includes an element of performance in the same way acting does. Bad writing may convey information, such as "It was a dark and stormy night," but we don't necessarily think it is good.

mike,

Are you really claiming that webster claims that communication is "the bland recital of informaiton devoid of imagry or wit", or words to that effect?

I think that good writing has a great deal of wit, but must be fundamentally communicative rather than entertaining in nature. Performance is entertainment rather than communication. Much bad writing is performance — the author having a session with his imaginary psychiatrist which he had the bad sense to write down.