What makes someone a bad writer? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

There are two kinds of bad writing: writing that is poorly done and writing that has little to offer. The former is a bit like having a weight problem — it might be unpleasant but it’s fixable. The latter is like having a bad personality or bad character — it’s intrinsically flawed.

The critic Toby Litt expressed it well when he said “bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” It’s not meant for the reader, it was all about the writer from the beginning.

An example of this is all the entrepreneurs out there writing books to use them as “business cards.” What these books offer the author is clear: They are looking to enhance their brand, meet clients, flatter their own ego. What these books offer readers? It’s as if they haven’t quite considered that.

On the other hand, writing that is a “love poem” about a beautiful piece of nature, a story that the writer lived, some truth they want to express—that’s what we want to read. And we’ll usually be willing to put up with mediocre writing to get to it if we must.

Take any good piece of writing, something that matters to you. Why is it good? Because of what it says. Because what the writer manages to communicate to you, their reader. It’s because of what’s within it, not how they wrote it.

Readers rarely say “Well, I got absolutely nothing out of this and have no idea what any of this means but it sure is technically beautiful!” But they say the opposite all the time, they say “Goddamn, that’s good” to things with typos, poor grammar and simple diction.

Good writing saves nothing. On the other hand, a deep, compelling or stunning message can float writers who struggle to even complete a sentence.

I don’t know the first thing about how to write (as you may have gathered by now). I nod along and pretend that I know what things like “subject” and “predicate” and “passive tense” actually mean. I mean, I think I have an idea, but it hasn’t held me back so far. To quote Arthur Schopenhauer, “to have something to say” is “by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style.” I’ll take grade school dropout writing passionately in his prison cell over some empty, superior Yale MFA any day.

I remember my editor at Penguin once said to me, as I was discussing some issue about how I wanted my book to be seen, “Ryan, it’s not what a book is, it’s what a book does.” For the reader. She wanted me to stop focusing on superficialities and make sure my book solved real problems and delivered real value to the people who picked it up.

So that’s the true difference between good writing and bad writing—what it does for the reader. The truth is most bad writing almost forgets that there is such thing as a reader. They don’t stop and think: Who am I making this for? What is the purpose of what I am making? No, they are just wrapped up in their own passion and self-infatuation.

Good writing might be done at a 3rd grade level or it might be done in the sparkling high style of F. Scott Fitzgerald but it always has one thing in common: it says something that moves us.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

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