History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

You may remember me requesting nominations for a Good Writing Contest about two months ago. I said it would end about one month ago. Instead, I've lazily allowed the link to sit in my sidebar until now. Sepoy and Rob both made some great nominations, but since the pool of nominations was small, I've decided not to pick a winner.

In truth, the contest was always tongue-in-cheek, an attempt to criticize the pretensions and apocalyptic tone of the Bad Writing Contest. Secretly, I always knew that I would be able to spin the results of the contest either way, as I pointed out in a comment over at Locus Solus, responding to a post on my Good Writing Contest by Paul:

You're right that the same charges brought against the BWC -- lack of context, begging of the question, etc. -- could be aimed at the GWC.

That's part of my point: can the critics of the BWC reasonably defend what "good writing" is? And can they do so while avoiding the same pitfalls that they accuse "bad" writers of falling into?

I think they can, but we'll see. I'm running the contest by following a variation of the First Law of Cross-Examining: never run a contest for which you don't know how to spin the results. If there are lots of nominations, I can declare the humanities alive and well. If there are very few nominations, I can claim that if it is so hard to say what "good" writing is, then why is it so easy to identify the "bad"? (Leave aside for a moment the more likely interpretation that no one reads my blog. I suspend that explanation thanks to the First Law of Blogging, which is always to assume that your statcounter must not work very well.) The fact that the deck is stacked is also part of the point: the deck was always stacked with the BWC too.

I still believe there are plenty of good writers in the humanities, and I continue to resist the ideas that all jargon is inaccessible, that all subtlety is obscurantist, and that all scholarship is dense. But as for now, I'm laying the First Ever Good Writing Contest quietly to rest. Thanks to those who linked, participated, and snickered along with me.