Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
No, I can't agree that accessibility can be a measure of the quality of a book's writing. Let's take as an example the original versions of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy" books. They are completely inaccessible to me, because I don't read Swedish. Is my lack of knowledge of Swedish really a factor by which one can judge the quality of the writing of the books? I don't personally think that it is. A book can be well written, but yet completely inaccessible to me if I don't speak the language in which it's written.
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If Stieg's target audience were English-only readers then I would say the books were extraordinarily badly written ... but that seems unlikely. As Maggie Leung pointed out, writers have a different target audiences and the accessibility of writing is usually measured according to the target. Some books, like Harry Potter, manage to be easily accessible even outside their target. A writer has to choose their style and their words, and even their story content, appropriately to make to it accessible their target audience - and this requirement makes me wonder and why you won't accept it as a measure (albeit one of several) of a book's quality. If they managed to make their book accessible to their target audience haven't they fulfilled at least one of the criteria of "good writing"?
As is probably obvious, I consider accessibility to be a
very important part of good writing. What would be the point of writing if your novel is not accessible to your target audience?