According to Cindy

Writing Book I’m reading:
Crafting Prose by Don Richard Cox and Elizabeth Giddens

Introduction: Understanding the Task

What does writing mean???
It is communicating something to someone. Even if you only write in a private diary or journal, you will be communicating to your self later.
Writing can be complex, and when it is done, you want what you have written to make sense not only to yourself but to others as well. It is easy for your writing to make sense to yourself. You know what you meant. It can be more of a challenge to make your writing sensible to others. This is compounded by the fact that others can put different meanings on the same sentences and paragraphs. Everyone has their own interpretation added to the most clear of writing.
This used to bother me, especially when I was speaking to others. When I’d hear my words back to me, with the other’s person’s interpretation added in, I hardly recognized the words as my own. Now I have come to realize that other’s interpretation of your own words says more about them than it says about self.
Of course that doesn’t help making your own point clear to other’s any easier. In fact, it makes it more of a challenge. But, it does help when you are writing to keep this dynamic in mind.
In this book, the author shows the text in the form of a triangle, and the writer, reader, and reality as three points on that triangle and says that without these three factors, you could not have a reading situation. Whichever factor gets the most emphasis determines what kind of writing you are doing.
Writer emphasis creates expressive prose.
Reader emphasis creates persuasive prose
Reality emphasis creates informative prose
Text emphasis creates literary prose
(I may have just solved the question: What is literary? HA)
For myself, while reading and reporting on this book, I will concentrate on expressive and literary. I don’t really care to persuade others to a different point of view and basic information reporting gets quite dull to me. Although it could be said that the very nature of this blog is informative, I would prefer to inform about the more creative type writing.
A letter or an essay would be expressive, advertisements are persuasive as are most politicians, a how to book would be informative and a novel would be (AHEM) literary. (Though some might argue how literary some novels really are…)
Even when one factor is emphasized, all other factors are still present in the background.