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Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice

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Re: Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice

#21
post #2

I’d add to this that most “How to write” or “style guide” books aren’t useful. They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose, but they can’t make you a good writer. For that you need to spend thousands of hours reading the work of expert writers. If you read a style guide like Strunk and White, you’ll come across a lot of nonsense. A particular bugbear of mine is the prohibition against passives,…

The most useful writing guide I've read is this advice by George Orwell: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

He also argues against using the passive, because simple conjunctions/prepositions are replaced by longer than needed phrases that just shit up the pages. If you switch to active you can then write with more precision and cut more text out during editing. Other advice I found useful was to never edit as you write, or you'll never finish.

Re: Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice

#22
post #13

I think "don't take other's advice" is just good advice in general, or at the very least "be skeptical of other's advice". I work in academic science where a lot of people of varying career stages are squished together in close proximity, and I encounter many situations where inexperienced and not that successful people are way too willing to shower even less experienced people with advice on how to live/do things. T…

The best advice I gain from other people is learning from their mistakes.

Re: Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice

#23
post #2

I’d add to this that most “How to write” or “style guide” books aren’t useful. They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose, but they can’t make you a good writer. For that you need to spend thousands of hours reading the work of expert writers. If you read a style guide like Strunk and White, you’ll come across a lot of nonsense. A particular bugbear of mine is the prohibition against passives,…

The most useful writing guide I've read is this advice by George Orwell: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit He also argues against using the passive, because simple conjunctions/prepositions are replaced by longer than needed phrases that just shit up the pages. If you switch to active you can then write with more precision and cut more text out during editing. Other advice I found useful wa…

[deleted]

Re: Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice

#25
post #2

I’d add to this that most “How to write” or “style guide” books aren’t useful. They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose, but they can’t make you a good writer. For that you need to spend thousands of hours reading the work of expert writers. If you read a style guide like Strunk and White, you’ll come across a lot of nonsense. A particular bugbear of mine is the prohibition against passives,…

> "They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose," Which is very often exactly what people are after! People who aren't deluding themselves don't think they're going to win any Pulitzers, they just want a marginal improvement as a courtesy to others who will have to read it. If a style guide can elevate their writing to mundane levels, then it has done it's job.

Strunk and White or Zinsser can help people to improve their writing for emails or reports at work, but both contain a lot of information that simply isn't true.

As someone who writes for a living, nothing gets my goat more than a client asking me to remove the passive clauses in the 10,000-word ebook I've just written for them because they read that passives are bad in Strunk and White, or they pasted the text into Grammarly and got some squiggly lines.

There are some style books that offer advice that is both useful and true.

- Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker

- Artful Sentences: Syntax As Style, by Virginia Tufte

- Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner

If people really want to know what's what where grammar is concerned, they should look at "A Student's Introduction to English Grammar" by Huddleston and Pullum. Or, even better "The Cambridge Grammar of English" by the same authors (although at 1800 pages, it's not for the faint of heart).

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