Are you an excellent writer?

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My writing is awesome. My speech... Not so much

I was considered a good writer in high school but I haven't really written anything in years.
I can't write good on forums because I have a socialphobia even on the internet.
Writing as a profession would be pointless because it is too competitive.

I occasional write political poetry but I have nobody to read it.I have basically given up for that reason.

My verbal laungage is not terrible but my writing is probably better. If I feel that writing is competitive or I am trying to impress someone it becomes very hard to write anything.

I make several spelling and punctuation errors and I am constantly using spell check.
Whenever I write an interesting post in this forum nobody responds. Then a more popular WP user writes almost the exact same thing and gets several responses. This angers me very much and makes me feel like this forum is a popularity competition.

Same! The internet never made any of my problems easier to cope with in an online setting.

*cough* Twilight *cough*
But seriously, being a professional writer really just means you get paid for it. In any field you'll find amateurs that have more skill than some professionals but lack the knowledge or interest to pursue it as a business.

I am an excellent writer and am redrafting a novel ready for publication. Which should be... interesting. I also run a writing service online, which nets me a few quid here and there. So I guess I'm a professional. I speak pretty well, but I tend to trip over words and forget them and sometimes use language that seems strange (that's Aspergers for you!). I struggle more when under stress. I hate telephones and much prefer email. But I've grown good by now at hiding my more obvious quirks.

I understand your point of view, but at least a professional writer would typically have a publisher who likes their work and an editor who'll help them stylise it. How can an independent writer know if they're 'doing it right'?

I know how to write as to if I can write. I wish I did not have dysleixa add to it the aspergers and part ADD and yeah life can be so much fun. Like on Sunday when we lost power. I had to do ever thing I could to hold it together. Which for the rest of the week really did a number on me and at about 8 ever night I was ready for bed. If I can't do things I do all the time it really starts to play on me.

So I e-mailed a letter to the editor of Cycle World magazine. Two days later he called me on the phone and asked me if I worked for Harley-Davidson or any other motorcycle company. In other words, was I a professional that was 'planting' material. When I said no he said he wanted to use the letter as the lead editorial and he was sending me $250 dollars. This was about ten years ago. It appeared in the April 2002 issue.

My writing ability deserves most of the credit for my 4.0 GPA in college. I was accused by several of my teachers of copying professional work but it didn't stick because it wasn't true. I hope they wasted days and weeks of their time trying to find the sources I was supposedly copying from. It wasn't my fault most of the other students turned in trash.

Writing is about the only thing I do well.

No. I have the creativity and the orthography and grammar skills (at least in my native language), but I am terrible at putting my ideas on paper. Whenever I try to write something, I will use too many words, give too much information and people will usually leave with more questions than they started with.

Maybe, maybe not. I think I'm an above-average wordsmith. Everything I've ever posted for critique online has been utterly ignored, so I take that to indicate I'm nowhere near as good as I think I am. I therefore can no longer share with people what I write because it seems pointless.

I am a class-A dunce at conversation, though.

Last edited by kestrel on 14 Jan 2012, 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People have told me that I am a decent writing. I score about average on most of my essays in school. I'm terrible at grammar. I find math and science to be more of my strong points than writing.

Grammar and math are basically equivalent. It's about logical relationships in language, rather than numbers.It took me years to understand it as such.

I disagree, at least in regards to English.

When it comes to English, a "grammar rule" is only true until it isn't. Some languages are better at keeping things consistent.

My knowledge of "proper English" was gleaned via lots of reading that eventually translated into an intuitive understanding. Nevertheless, I have sympathy for bad writers who can't grasp the mercurial moods of English.

You're right; many people have misused basic grammar for so long that it's become systemic in the language. Words drift in meaning through connotative usage, and there is always more than one solution to the structure of a given sentence. I have to order things logically, and grammar makes far more sense to me when approached from a math-centric perspective. It helps me figure out how to clarify meaning by ordering words in sentences by logical relationship, which is a lot like algebra when it comes down to the technical nitty-gritty. That's the only reason I say it's equivalent to math. It isn't necessarily so, but it can be so if that's how you approach it.

It took years to get to the point where I can look at it that way, though, and, like you, it's mostly from reading intensively and extensively. I sympathize when people struggle with it, I'm just not good at how I express it, I guess.

Wow.

You've got a pretty cool take on it.

I just basically imitate what I read.

I have been told that I have an accessible writing style, I am able to explain complex facts in a way that readers from a wide range of backgrounds can understand. Since my AS diagnosis I have realised that I don't write like that to help the reader. I do it so that I am confident that readers will understand it as I do and partly also to demonstrate to the reader that I understand, and believe, what I have written.