And as one of my French/literature teachers used to say, in the end a great writer is someone people enjoy to read. You do with Jordan, so he's one of your great writers and in many ways that should be enough.

If we look at the established canons of "good writing", Jordan just doesn't fit many of them (Sanderson even less). He's not a very good stylist. His metaphors are often ackward, cliché or downright non-sensical. His grammar and syntax are functional at best and his prose is for the most part utilitarian. He can carry on a story, but the language he uses isn't very imaginative, let alone exceptional. He's also extremely conservative in the literary devices he uses. He was very decent when he decided to evoke through his descriptions - you get a very clear mental image of what he describes, but most often he failed to keep it fresh. When he said something once, he very often re hashed it later, when he had to describe the same thing. His descriptions were too often mundane, he failed to find that special something that make you look at something fairly mundane through a unique or entertaining perspective. Contrary to a lot of people's opinion, Jordan just wasn't a "very descriptive writer" (they really should try Flaubert of Proust if they think Jordan is "descriptive". The problem is the opposite: his descriptions are too short yet too mundane and too abundant and too repetitive. A low cut yellow silk dress slashed with green is boring, utilitarian. A better descriptive writer will approach descriptions like this from a more unique and special perspective, making having to establish materially a scene an opportunity to tell something about the culture, the character or even the themes and motifs. In a way, Jordan kept it too short and was too systematic about it, creating a very repetitive and occasionally tedious effect - but thankfully these descriptions were always really short.

Another problem with his writing comes from his very large ambitions with WOT. He's writing something epic that isn't an epic and isn't written or structured like an epic is expected to be written. Of course, there are reasons why epics came to be written in certain ways and not others. Jordan rather ambitionned to write the little and great stories in a world while a classic heroic epic is ongoing, so to mix many genres and enter uncharted territory. There's no "map" to writing something like WOT.

The epic in WOT is just the backbone to which he returns when he's not focussed on what goes on around it. He's in some way merged the soap structure and devices with that of the epic. Even with his main hero, Jordan chose to make the mundane as important if not more than the telling of the epic episodes (which he didn't want to deprive of their mundane aspects as well). WOT also borrows from the tropes of the historical novel, but with the added challenge that Jordan couldn't rely on the reader's culture to fill the gaps: he had to include everything about the world he wished his readers to know about, and this space/time existed only in Jordan's own mind.

The other part of the problem comes from the fact Jordan wrote novels that aren't really novels but chapters of one giant story. It was very ambitious and risky, and in part Jordan has failed, literary speaking (storytelling wise it's another matter, and far more subjective). The first few books respected more the classic novel form and structure, but the later books of WOT function less and less as novels, but rather than simply abandonning the form, Jordan insisted on trying to wrote these as novels, with the conservative structure of a novel (he didn't meet the challenge of inventing a form of his own to carry this huge story, one could say). This of course slow down a lot the storytelling, as he added many things just to build up to a last act in each book, and in many of the later books his efforts were rather ackward. Jordan attempted to write novels that would only be large chapters, and sometime the result of that "bastard form" was ackward. As Jordan didn't finish the whole story first (an impossible task), he had to make many compromises a novelist normally won't make if he wants his story to be as good as it could be. Usually, after completion of a novel, the writer has the freedom to go back and fine tune his work, polish or fix the little structural problems, re balance his storylines by adding or removing episodes, take a look back at the development of his themes and fix issues, and so on. The way Jordan wrote WOT, he never had this opportunity. He rather wrote a very large chapter, trying to arrange it as a proper novel then he moved on to the next, never able to go back to fix problems he's created. He had to follow his plan, and trust he's not misjudge anything nor failed to spot any problem. That resulted in many compromises and flaws he had no choice to live with, compounded by his choice to keep using the classic novel structure, so to have his introduction acts, his development acts and his ending in each book. Some of his "episodes" turned out to be too short for the length he would have to carry them (Perrin's late series storyline is such a case, Rand's of course, and Elayne's). Rand Jordan pushed aside for a while, but with Perrin and Elayne Jordan had no choice but to expand and slow the pace, beyond what these storylines called for, and as they spanned many novels, he was stuck with adding a few intro chapters and find temporary conclusions/breaking points. A novelist, or even a writer of a trilogy, would simply look back at the end and tidy and tighten everything up. Once he had published a "chapter", Jordan rather had no choice but to live with his previous decisions, even when he misdjudged the pace at which he could develop the story in the next book. All this makes Jordan appear a worse writer than he actually is. One might say he was over ambitious to think he could keep control of something so vast and so long, as would a "normal novel". One might also say it's unfair to judge his abilities to structure a story in the circumstances, but no one forced Jordan to attempt writing this mammoth either.

All that said, I still very much enjoy the books and those flaws barely hindered my fun reading WOT. I also find him a lot of strengths as a storyteller, worldbuilder and character creator that for me more than compensate for his flaws as a novelist. There's plenty of other books to read for their amazing prose or depth of thought. When I read Jordan I ask for immersion into a story and not to bore me, and that's already more than enough. If anything, my respect for Jordan's skills and, for all the fact it's all from perfect, is relative mastery of something so huge (his mastery of WOT's continuity is in itself an achievement) has increased after seing what Brandon, working under the pressure of a deadline, without being the creator of the material and with much less experience as a writer could do in Jordan's shoes (ie: his AMOL re engineered on the go as a trilogy is so far is a barely enjoyable structural mess that makes Jordan's most poorly structured episodes/novels look really well written in comparison).