Macrorie

"A great judge remembers how hard it is to be good." Ken Macrorie from "Circle of Implication" in College English 1967, page 459.

The context for this quote was Macrorie talking about how we are automatically judging when we decide to write. Just choosing to write about something is applying some judgement on the topic: "This is important", "this is beautiful", "this is wrong", etc.

I think this is good advice for anyone approaching a paper that is evaluative or argumentative in nature. It helps a person to remember empathy, and taking an empathetic position will only make a person more credible, more believable. As we all have experienced in life, taking a position of extreme judgement or anger only hurts our arguments in the end, squashing the logos aspect of any argument. It just sends the wrong vibe and makes ap person seem too heated or emotional about the topic to analyze it logically. That's why this quote appealed to me. It's a great view to adopt when writing, and it encourages empathy; which in the end can help me to understand the subjects of my topic even better.

"The best judge is an empathetic one."

In my imitation, I used a word choice that would sum up the last bit of Macrorie's quote: empathetic. I went with imitating the structure of those Chinese proverbs, trying to put judge and empathy in the same context in order to say they are one in the same--or should be.