Mark Twain Good Writing

I think that Mark Twain is trying to say that there is no such thing as "good" writing and you can never "train" yourself to be a good writer. You never really choose what you write, but your subconscious chooses for you. Your subconscious develops a way of writing that you like and it uses it every time. You never really consciously think about what you're going to write, but you already have phrases and words that you enjoy using and sound nice to you, and you use them to explain your thoughts. I agree with twain on his idea that your subconscious is what is writing for you because of how quickly we can come up with something and our judgments on other's writings.

When I am writing assigned a paper to write and am about to start it, I never really know what to do until I suddenly begin to put together words and phrases that I think are really nice and I begin to piece them together to describe the topic. We each have a voice that we use to talk and as we write, we are just talking and when we think that something doesn't sound right, we don't even consider putting it down. We each have our own taste and our own voice that we use and when there is something we wouldn't say, we don't. We never once stop and question whether or not a phrase sounds like something we would say because we only think of things that we would say. Our mind automatically rejects anything that doesn't sound like us or that we just don't like. And because it something that we would say, when we are done writing, as Twain puts it "…YOU feel complimented…"

It is because WE wrote it that it sounds