
Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice - mighty-fine
https://lithub.com/some-writing-advice-dont-take-others-advice/
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el_cujo
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. This seems to be the most common with
graduate students talking to slightly newer graduate students. It's self-
affirming for most people to give instructions and feel like they are being
listened to, and I too often see this impulse outweighing the idea of the
advice actually being useful.

For me personally, two things that determine if somebody is in a position to
give me advice are:

1)Are they enjoying a level of success that I would like to achieve? 2)Is the
environment in which they achieved success comparable to my own?

~~~
CPLX
Other people’s advice is generally useless, mostly because you aren’t them.
You’re facing a different set of circumstances while in possession of a
different set of resources.

Other people’s _stories_ however are almost always useful in some way, though
not always in the way they intend.

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ibudiallo
But there is a reason people seek advice: writing is hard.

I've always wanted to write, and I sought the help of some pretty good
writers. They gave me great advice. But no amount of advice can be applied to
a blank page.

So I wrote, pretty badly at first, you can see it on my blog.

Writing is hard. Imagine, you have an idea in your head, and you like it. You
grab a keyboard and write it down, somehow you write something else, not the
idea in your head. You have to force your brain to say what it means to say.

There is no problem with reading other's advice, as long as you have some
writing to apply it to. However, in my case I benefit more from reading what
those people write, rather then read their advice.

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Veen
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,
which is utter rubbish[0]. Don’t waste your time hunting down passives and
split infinitives under the illusion that it will make your writing better. It
won’t.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/suAASPc_s0A](https://youtu.be/suAASPc_s0A)

~~~
mbrock
I think the US government’s “plain language” site has examples showing that
changing passive to active can definitely improve texts, like here:
[https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-
after/empl...](https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-
after/employment-assistance/)

~~~
Veen
Passives are an information structuring tool that writers use to control how
information is presented in a sentence. They can be used well or they can be
poorly.

For example, on the page you linked to the first line of the body text reads:

> This example was created for training and is not official agency text.

The first clause of that sentence is in the passive voice — “was created” —
and is a good example of how passives should be used. Nothing is gained by
replacing it with:

> We created this example for training and it is not official agency text.

~~~
ghaff
IMO which of those works better is a function of the overall tone of the
piece.

The passive version probably fits better in a Howto or manual that is focused
on just communicating information in a neutral just-the-facts way.

The active version fits better with a style that's going for something more
conversational.

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yowlingcat
This seems overly reactionary. Writing is hard, and specific, and the devil is
always in the details as it relates to a person, so it's almost nonsensical to
give generally applicable writing advice. But, I don't think that makes it
impossible to give advice as it pertains to a particular style.

I've found that if you want to be a good writer, you need interesting material
to draw from. That can come from your imagination, your lived experiences,
other material you've read, or most likely all of the above, but you're
engaging in world building first and foremost. I particularly like this
Faulkner quote:

“I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and
he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do
then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says.
It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character.
You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then,
of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among
the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which
you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is
mechanical. Most of the the writing has got to take place up here before you
ever put the pencil to the paper. But the character’s got to be true by your
conception and by your experience, and that would include, as we’ve just said,
what you’ve read, what you’ve imagined, what you’ve heard, all that going to
giving you the gauge to measure this imaginary character by, and once he comes
alive and true to you, and he’s important and moving, then it’s not too much
trouble to put him down.”

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Noumenon72
The article is entirely about work patterns; when and where to write, and how
to find motivation to do so. For that kind of thing, the advice "find what
works for you" is better advice than "do what works for me". (Although the
latter advice still often helps.)

But _writing_ advice is another thing entirely. Learning to think about your
audience while writing is every bit as amenable to advice as learning to think
about the processor's branch prediction while coding. Advice like "form a
chain from stress position to topic position"
([https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-
sci...](https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-science-of-
scientific-writing)), or the "arcs of coherence" from Steven Pinker's _The
Sense of Style_. Human perception processes language in understood ways.
Conforming to those expectations requires learning from advice.

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thwave
The best advice I ever heard: Every text you read is both an advice how to
write and an advice how not to.

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atoav
I think the only advice you need is:

\- if you are creating figures: research and be empathic to the real reasons
why people act like they do. Observe life

\- be aware of the functions certain words, phrases, sentences or sections
fulfill in the system of your text

\- become a good reader: if you’re sensitive to language, this can be your
failsafe, it will protect you from writing things you didn’t intend

\- Just write and don’t be afraid to throw things out.

\- don’t overly rely on dramatic systems, because you will end up telling low
impact predictable stories like everybody else

~~~
mbrock
And practice editing, especially deleting.

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olaf
I think that is self contradictory.

