Writing advice is a lie.

Just learn grammar and rhetoric instead

So many people read writing advice. It’s everywhere. The woods are full of it. Even here on Substack, half the Literature leaderboard is essentially self-help and writing advice.

Here’s the thing. You should ignore this stuff. Almost all of it is wrong. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong.

Most of it isn’t going to teach you where to put your verbs or what a left-branching sentence is. Most of it isn’t going to teach you the tropes of rhetoric or the patterns of syntax.

You won’t ever read the most important thing a writer can know, that grammar is logic.

Instead, they’ll make it sound easy. Write like you speak. Write simply. Forget all the complicated things they taught you in school. Write how you feel. If you don’t enjoy writing it, they won’t enjoy reading it.

There are enough of these phrases to make a drinking game. Which is probably the best thing you can do with them.

Some writing advice gets to technique. But it is usually bad technique. One perpetual memes is a paragraph from a book of writing advice that teaches you to vary your sentence length to make it sound musical and persuasive. It routinely gets millions of views on social platforms.

It’s wrong. Sentences are not to be arbitrarily varied for the sake of abstract sound. Grammar is logic. Sound is married to sense. That paragraph works because it embodies what it says!

You could easily do the same thing but for short sentences, long sentences, complex sentences, left-branching sentences, periodic sentences, fragmented sentences.

Here are some examples.

Write short! It snaps! It sells! It’s simple! It works!

If you want to sound professional, write the sort of sentences you used to write at college. (Or at least write the sort of sentences you wanted to write.) Don’t give in to the temptation to make everything as short as possible, but instead let your sentences flow to their natural conclusion. Trust your readers to be as smart as your writing.

Short sentences are fine for most writing, but not this sort of writing. They might look good on adverts, but not on literary Substacks.

However you write, write left-branching sentences. Like detective movies, they open unexpectedly.

Undoubtedly, for those writers looking to impress themselves upon the attention of modern intellectuals, nothing could be more apposite, nor more satisfying, than a good old-fashioned periodic sentence.

Fragments sound smart. Intriguing. They leave possibilities open. Look mysterious. Ineluctable. Daring.

Writing advice is a lie because it doesn’t teach you things like this, and so it doesn’t give you the techniques to choose from. If a writer doesn’t know enough about different sentence structures, they are like a carpenter trying to make a table with only enough wood for a chair.

I recently saw the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities used like this. The advice was that “you can show the complexity of an era by highlighting the contradictions within it.” There’s “no need to complicate things” (Drink!) “All you need is a list of opposites.”

The famous paragraph in question (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”) is being misused. Dickens chose to use antithesis because it suitably described the era he was writing about and because it fitted the structure of his novel. It suited the story he was telling—both in terms of the plot and in terms of the moral sentiment. He wasn’t keeping it simple. He wasn’t merely describing complexity. He was writing with artistic purpose. He was using grammar as logic.

Plenty of people have shown the complexity of an era without using this technique in this way. Other techniques that might be used include: a list, anaphora, in media res narrative, direct testimony… The point is not to take an example of fine writing and generalise from it about what you should do, but to become proficient in the different techniques of writing so that you, too, may suit the style to the purpose.

Here is Barbara Tuchman taking a very different approach to summing up the complexities of an era, this time using a metaphor, from the opening of A Distant Mirror.

…the 14th century suffered so many “strange and great perils and adversities” (in the words of a contemporary) that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven—sex, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church. All but plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over.

Who among us doesn’t want to write like that?

Unless the people offering writing advice are going to tell you what antithesis is, or a periodic sentence, and show you different ways of using them, and the sort of effect they have—so that you can use the right style for the right function—, all you are getting is over-generalised, over-simplified, opinion, not actual writing advice.

Good writing advice will tell you the functions of grammar, like what a colon does: in Fowler’s words, a colon delivers the goods invoiced in the previous clause. It will tell you the uses of rhetoric, such that parallelism allows you to balance ideas in a sentence the way counterpoint allows a composer to balance melodies in a piece of music.

Above all, it will start not from a gaudy, glamorous premise, with promises about how easy it is to produce great writing. It will begin, as Swift did: “Proper words in proper places are the making of a style.” If you want to know something about writing, in other words, ditch the advice, and learn the rules.

For that, you are better off reading books like the various grammar guides, Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Fowler’s Modern English, Forsyth’s Elements of Eloquence, or any other primer of rhetoric. Read as many of these as you need to so that you can practice the techniques you find there.

And of course, read as much actual good writing as possible. The best writing advice is actually reading advice.