It’s hard not to be nebulous when writing these, so I’ll do my best not to be. Broadly speaking, our goal is to improve writing. In my mind, writing improvement comes in two ways. One is practice, and the other is critique. Practice is just something the writer has to be responsible for themselves. Like any skill, writing must be developed through labor.

Critique however, ah, that we can provide. We can critique your own writing, and we can critique published authors. Why we would critique your writing is self evident, that’s the direct way of helping you. We critique published authors for a number of reasons.

1. Published authors tend to be role models and idols to young and developing writers, who may try and emulate them. By pointing out mistakes in these published authors, we can expose the aspects of their writing that should not be idolized or imitated.

2. Published authors tend to make very common mistakes. These mistakes are so common that a lot of people don’t even realize they are mistakes. By pointing out these mistakes, you can identify them in your own writing and correct the mistakes.

3. Published authors deserve more scrutiny. You know what? They are published, we aren’t, so we are going to hold them up to a higher standard. And if we find them subpar, then so be it. We get amusement value, and they still make millions of (sometimes) undeserved dollars.

We go after large, popular series as a method of promoting awareness of issues. That even a few people think that Inheritance or Twilight are examples of good writing indicates that there is an awareness of good and bad writing that needs to be raised. In a word of so many great writers, it seems ridiculous to me that some people could be confused about what great writing is, but it happens.