Most Common Writing Errors (ONGOING)

Subjectivity Vs. Objectivity

This chapter briefly talks about subjectivity and objectivity along with the differences between them.

Read the disclaimer if you haven't already.

Let me ask you guys a question, and answer (mentally or in a comment) with yes or no:

Do you know what subjectivity and objectivity mean?

Part of learning writing is learning every aspect of it. If you just study grammar or how to write, you're going to be a narrow-minded author. I would strongly recommend studying theory, reading books and classics, and looking into the topics surrounding writing.

One of those topics is subjectivity and objectivity.

I wrote a research paper in my academic writing class about subjectivity and objectivity. My goal was to see if we can judge art objectively. My finding was yes, we can, but based on small criteria. For books, an example of the criteria would be grammar and spelling since there is a right or wrong way to do it.

Writing is not like math. If your professor puts 2 + 2 = 6 on the board, you have objective reasons to disagree and prove the professor wrong. The reasons aren't subjective because you're basing them on fact, not feelings.

That's the very basic difference between objectivity and subjectivity.

Subjectivity is more personal and opinion-based while objectivity is more fact-based.

An objective observation would be less debatable. An objective observation would be something like, "Proper nouns need to be capitalized." If an author does not capitalize proper nouns, they are doing it objectively wrong.

A subjective observation would be something that isn't objectively right or wrong. While you can be right or wrong with grammar, it's much harder to be right or wrong with creativity.

There is no "right" or "wrong" way to write concepts, characters, themes, etc. I put "right" and "wrong" in quotes because there are too many exceptions to count.

I think this will help authors understand the judging process too. I've been on record saying you should stand up for yourself if a judge is incompetent, but I also don't want to encourage attacking judges who are objectively right about your story.

For example, if they take off points in grammar because you do dialogue tags wrong, you can't argue with that because, unless you are doing them right, the judge is correct.

If they take off points in pacing because the sentences are hard to read due to grammar issues (making the pacing feel sloppy), they're right.

If the character emotions feel weak because the dialogue is formatted wrong and the sentences have no punctuation, then the judge is, generally, right. Character emotions are subjective, but how they're written grammatically is objective.

I hope that makes sense.

To summarize, subjective opinions are based on personal feelings. Objective opinions are based on logic and fact. While it is hard to judge art objectively, it is possible, such as through grammar (as I just demonstrated).

There isn't much to say about this topic since I believe it is one you should research yourself if you're interested. There's a lot that goes into it, but since it doesn't directly relate to how to write, I won't make this chapter too long, especially considering how long the last chapter was.

Which, btw, please go read it if you haven't, that chapter took a lot of time.

I hope this chapter provided some insight regardless of the length!

~End~

I have a lot of topics I will be covering in the future. I'm going to do the topics I have planned first, then I'll get to the requested topics ^^

Remember to follow for more tips like this. Vote and comment, leave requests for future topics if you'd like!