As first-year students make their way through college, they become exposed to new writing formats, processes, tips, and criteria. Through learning college writing skills, they begin to formulate their own ideas about what a true writer is. The bad idea that’ll be of particular focus is stated in the title of authors Dustin Edwards and Enrique Paz’s essay: “Only Geniuses Can Be Writers” in the book “Bad Ideas About Writing”. In their essay, Edwards and Paz shed light on the very well-known yet inaccurate idea that all good writers are unsociable and can write original, inspiring masterpieces with ease. They argue that this faulty idea is severely detrimental to neophyte writers and, in truth, never existed. A better idea would be that good writers cooperate to help each other compose new and better writing of their own using old ideas.
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To come to this conclusion, the authors take a historical approach to the idea, exploring the meaning of genius authorship throughout history. They discovered that due to the expansion of readers in the 18th century, people started wanting to make a living off of their written work. Because of this demand, certain standards had to be developed to determine what a genius writer was. Namely, their ability to create rather than just write. Edwards and Paz state that “They claimed that true authors are not inspired by the outside world; they are inspired by their [own] unique selves.” (Edwards and Paz 66). To rephrase, “true” authors were required to have completely original work. If any cooperation or assistance had taken place, the quality of the writing decreased substantially. Genius writing had to be wholly by that author; inspired writing was heavily critiqued.
Consequently, upcoming authors in the 18th century struggled to succeed because of such unrealistic standards. To counter the originality-preaching argument, Edwards and Paz reason that “An even deeper [look into] history reveals a more esteemed regard for imitation”(Edwards and Paz 67). The authors assert that educational collaboration was widely practiced in ancient cultures. People would learn skills from one another, recycling old ideas to come up with even better ones. This kind of writing is what Edwards and Paz argue should be restored.
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One of the most pivotal sources that the authors include in their essay is Martha Woodmansee’s article “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’”. In her writing, Woodmansee aims to dismantle the historical notion that an author’s work must be entirely original. Her main argument is that the value of writing shouldn’t be solely based on its innovativeness. Instead, it should be based on the value of the entire new perspectives that they’ve accumulated from another writer’s idea(s). Throughout her article, Woodmansee mainly focuses on how the definition of an author evolved through the Renaissance period. One example she gives illustrates that the author was known to only receive his inspiration from within himself. Woodmansee claims that “Inspiration came to be explicated in terms of [the] original genius…”(Woodmansee 427). During the Renaissance, the attribute that seemingly defined an author was how ingenious he was, and “genius” in that era was defined as originality. Although this rule complicated things for writers, it made the lives of publishers and editors far easier. Woodmansee introduces both conflicting viewpoints about this idea. The economically logical argument: originality and creation, versus the author’s argument: growth and collaboration. However, people ultimately prioritized the freshness and originality of a piece of writing, and the opposing side received little attention. After reading Woodmansee’s article and Edwards and Paz’s essay, one begins to notice how their subject matters begin to align. Because all three authors took more of a historical approach to support their similar arguments, their ideas integrated smoothly.
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In conclusion, Dustin Edwards, Enrique Paz, and Martha Woodmansee collaborated to present a better idea and potentially eradicate a bad idea; to deliver a potential solution to an existing problem. Together, the authors introduce a better idea about writers: they collaborate to help each other create their own ideas from someone else’s. Discovering the “better idea” using different authors demonstrates the power of combined efforts, and the potential answers it could reveal. One couldn’t help but wonder, how many other unresolved questions can be cleared up with a collaboration? How impactful can academic teamwork be?
Works Cited
Edwards, Dustin and Paz, Enrique. “Only Geniuses Can Be Writers,” in Bad Ideas About Writing. Edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe, 64-70. Web
Woodmansee, Martha. “The Genius and the Copyright: Economical and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 1984, pp. 425-448. JSTOR