I am one of five graduating staff writers from The Sun’s Arts & Culture department, and as I reflect upon my two years with the paper, I can honestly say that I’ve found my time to be very productive. It was through writing for The Sun that I found an authorial voice, came to appreciate the importance of artistic criticism (my focus area) and learned to seriously consider every word and punctuation mark. The Sun has an incredibly organized editing process that made this type of development possible. The problem is that at The Sun, all of these stages of development are immortalized in publication.
I initially hesitated to end my time on The Sun on a critical note, but during my tenure in Arts and Culture, I’ve come to believe that while criticism can be negative in substance, its purpose is not negative. The New Yorker book critic Becca Rothfeld once said, “I regard my criticism as a demand for the perfection that novels, in virtue of their magic, owe us. Simone Weil once wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘It seems to me certain that this constitutes a serious imperfection in you. And why should there be any imperfection in you? It does not suit you in the least to be imperfect. It is like a wrong note in a beautiful song.’”
Similarly, The Sun’s editor-in-chief, Sophia Dasser, recently wrote that the biggest threat facing the University is “surrender to the darkness of mediocrity that dims us. The Sun burns to resist that dimming.” With the presumption that The Cornell Sun could be perfect, I write to express my belief that the paper’s subjective side, for all its good, should place much more emphasis on the quality of writing that it publishes.
I’ll make the sweeping generalization that college newspapers have two broad goals, the first being to publish a respectable body of work and the second to provide opportunities for young writers. It’s obvious how these goals could conflict. A nascent writer could produce a piece unworthy of publication, but the act of creating it nonetheless improved their craft. If published, the first goal is sacrificed in favor of the second. A middling piece may put off casual readers, and although it benefitted the writer at the time, as they grow, they may not be thrilled to have their most amateur work available forever.
Imagine a film review where the author says, “I read [the book it was based on] for the first time in recent months, although I initially watched the movie adaptation years ago.” This is a line I wrote in my second article for The Sun, still available today — I read it now and cringe. I wish I had been told that placing myself into my reviews distracted from my actual analyses and was a waste of a word count. Instead, I came to that realization slowly as I wrote and read more criticism. In writing that piece, I learned to consider how art affects its audience, but still, the piece as it was published was mediocre. While The Sun gave me an opportunity to write, they also published an article that I will no longer defend — you see how quality and opportunity do not go hand in hand.
Take another line from my early writing: “The best picture race is pretty connected to [the best director race].” The observation is fine, but the verb choice is very weak. The quality of the whole piece is sufficient, so the publication-quality prong and the writer-opportunity prong are both satisfied, yet there was still a missed opportunity for writer development. (I’ll note that my qualms are not a failing of The Sun’s section editors, whose primary job is copy editing.)
I could continue. I can’t dictate exactly how The Sun should reform, but generally, I think the goal of offering young writers opportunity, while admirable, should instead be replaced by a goal to offer young writers the chance to develop. This could look like having new writers produce sample pieces that receive heavy constructive criticism before they are actually published, or mandating semesterly one-on-one critiques with alumni or editors, opportunities that The Sun has already offered on a voluntary basis. It could look like requiring seminars with professors who have journalism backgrounds, or testing writers on a syllabus about the craft of their subsection. It could be something intense, like a Law Review write-on. The Sun could even accept fewer writers, as I am concerned that rapid growth will exacerbate a quantity-over-quality dynamic (150 contributors have joined The Sun this past year!). These practices are far more mild than some of the absurdities that many other clubs require.
The Sun did not invent the idea of de-centering writing quality. As a student studying English, I am all too familiar with the new fad of writing evaluation that heavily prioritizes effort over skill, and I have had to explicitly ask many of my professors to critique my prose rather than my ideas alone. What this philosophy gets wrong is that it sees criticism as mean-spirited or superficial, when really, criticism is the most effective way to give a writer the ability to effectively express their ideas. I am hopeful that this experiment in compositional pedagogy is coming to an end: Young writers will inevitably create mediocre work — it doesn’t make them stupid, but it means they need to be taught how to improve. At The Sun, I believe that increased rigor could be for the better of the paper and the better of the writers. In its pursuit of perfection, The Sun should usher in such change.
Chloe Asack is a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at casack@cornellsun.com.
