What is a good paper? A good paper consists of many elements; the basic three elements of a good writing are the topic, audience, and purpose. The topic is what the paper is about. Once the topic has been established keeping ideas clear and organized will help the audience reading understand your topic. The audience is your reader. Writers need to have a purpose. There are many reasons on why to write a paper: persuading, telling something, describing, informing, and so on. By writing a unified and coherent paper all of these elements tie together. A story will then become clear to the reader what it is about and why the author feels the way he/she does. A good paper will keep a readers attention and leave them wanting more.
On the other hand, a bad paper lacks in some or all of the basic writing elements. A paper may have a topic but not be clear or focused on what is about. The information supporting the purpose for why the writer is writing may be vague or lack enough variety to keep the readers full attention. Having the same kind of sentence structure repeating tends to bore a reader and causes them to lose interest: short sentences, long sentences, and semicolon sentences. Duplicating information over and over and over is a good way to have a weak paper. Not having strong information and good language can make a writer look uneducated and cause a reader to not have interest in the writing. Bad writing usually misses many basic and key elements to writing a good reader friendly paper.