Too frequently, writ-ers attempt to rigidly use what has worked for them in other situ-ations, only to find out the hard way that such rigid re-use is notappropriate in the new setting.
And as a reader, I feel like you can tell when something is written poorly because of this. For example, in a romance novel, going into heavy detail of a setting or a scene is effective but when it comes to writing a thriller or horror, it's best to leave things to the imagination.
A better notionof how writing works is one that recognizes that after learningscribal skills (letters, basic grammatical constructions), everythinga writer does is impacted by the situation in which she is writing.
It's probably for this reason that people are "bad" at English even though they can speak it, read it and write it. Just because someone has fundamental knowledge of language, this doesn't give them the tools to analyze, express themselves in a certain way or determine what makes good writing "good".
The same is true forany other kind of writing—we write in our journals and think ofour future selves or anyone who might find the journal. We writeas biologists for other specialists who understand previous find-ings and value the ideas of some biologists more than others.
What she's trying to see is that to write is to write with an audience in mind, even yourself, because if that weren't the case, there would be no point in putting a pen to paper at all. All writing will be read by someone at some point so you're trying to gage what they would like.