Anything Can Be Criticized

Writing may be one of the hardest things to do. Especially, because every piece of writing can always be criticized which makes it hard to come up with a speech that everyone will like. In class we were given four speeches; our job was to rewrite each one of them. Two were rewritten while following George Orwell’s rules and the other two were rewritten while doing the opposite.

            The first two required us to shorten down the speeches and take away any unnecessary words. It was surprising to see that these famous people used sentences and words that were completely useless. The only reasons they used them was to make the speech sound smart and long. The funny part is that most of the time it works.  There was a staggering amount of unneeded information in each speech, as each speech must’ve lasted 5-10 minutes when in fact I could have been completed in 2-3 minutes. Even in that time frame they would have covered the same amount of information, but it would have contained less unnecessary sentences and words.

            The other speeches were right to the point and well written, but our job was to pack them with more words and sentences. It was actually quite mean, as we were taking a perfectly good speeches and ruining them by adding more words. But that is why writing is so hard; no matter what you do people always have criticism. For instance, in these two speeches people would’ve accused them of not having enough strong vocabulary words. Their belief is that by adding more strong vocabulary words it would make the speech sound ‘better’ and ‘smarter’. The fact is that once we did add all those strong vocabulary words, it made the speeches confusing and took away all their essence.  Even though this exercise made the speeches’ bad it was much easier than the other one. Moreover, there are a million ways to say the same thing and a synonym can be found for almost every single word. This makes our job much easier we just added a bunch of synonyms and made singular sentences into numerous one’s. We made the speech have fine vocabulary words, but we took away its meaning.

            Every piece of writing no matter whom it’s from has flaws. In order to become better speech writers or writers in general for that matter, we have to use the method that portrays our writing the best. If the goal is be in front of an audience and be there for 1 hour then it may be understandable to  fill your paper with multiple sentences and words who’s goal is to reveal the same opinion. However, when we are just trying to get a point across, then it may be more suitable to just get straight to it and skip unnecessary sentences. Critics will always be there to bother you, but if you want to be a great author then they shouldn’t matter; you should just do what’s best for you. In fact, you are your best critic.