Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
Re-quoting myself "One writes to communicate with their audience, not to confuse them."
Whenever you write something for public consumption, you are writing to an audience. To write well and effectively, you have to identify who that audience is, and write in a manner that communicates to them-- else you either will not get your intended message across or you will turn your audience away. That is Writing 101.
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Doesn't that rather depend on the purpose of the writing. In a political speech presumably what one is trying to do by the use of rhetorical devices is persuade someone of something. In a piece of fiction what one is trying to do is provide a framework for the reader to build a representation of the world one is trying to portray. Not all writing is about "getting messages across", some of it is far better than that. Some of the best writing actually seems to block the easy comprehension of what is written in order to achieve particular aesthetic or meaning effects - I guess James Joyce's
Ulysses is a parade example of that.
What you describe may well be Writing 101, I don't know, but a lot of what I read does not have the literal transmission of information as its aim.