When Writer Speak

Maybe all writers are supposed to do is to write well.

Source: Lilley, Kathryn. Writer Using Quill. Digital image. The Kill Zone: Reader Friday: What Kind of Writer Are You? N.p., 26 Apr. 2013. Web. 25 Aug. 2013.

While pondering why a great writer would need notes to participate in a great discussion, Arthur Krystal realizes that writers only need to be writers. Krystal, the author of When Writers Speak, has written for many highly-ranked newspapers and publications such as The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Book Review among others. He is a published author who has written three books. His essay, When Writers Speak, is about how writers are not necessarily communications experts and should not be treated as such. Anyone could read this essay and draw applicable meaning from it. The audience doesn't have to include the verbally-clumsy writer it was written about. This is a very far-reaching essay with a universal audience. To achieve his purpose, Krystal uses an antithesis-like layout on the second page; he presents Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, who argues that when a professional writer sits down to write, they deliberately have to be clear. Additionally, he reasons that writers generally have editors. Krystal debunks Pinker by saying that he isn't only a better as a writer, he's less boring, too. Since entertainment can't be edited into a paper, Pinker's argument is invalid. Krystal also uses syntactic fluency. The length and complexity of his sentences vary, making him easy to follow and proving that he is a smart writer. He reasons he is not smart "in person" because "different words and phrases would be generated" (Krystal 3). Krystal's purpose in writing When Writers Speak is abundantly clear. He wants to tell the reader that it is unreasonable to ask a specialist to work outside their specialty. The author not only achieved his purpose, he ingrained it in the reader. He made the reader feel appreciated, almost as if anything more than just doing their job was excessive and reward-worthy. Writing in the first person made him very relatable and understandable, which worked perfectly. He didn't try to make the average person into a reader, and he didn't force the reader to do anything other than read. His writing paralleled his purpose.