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.
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.
There are cases where eliminating passive voice can improve things. In a lot of the example cases I've seen in such guides, however, the examples are somewhat straw-man sentences that don't have so much to do with passive vs active.
I also agree with the grand-parent that as writing advice for literature it's bad advice. I'd also like to state that passives are a tool, and like any tool they can be and are misused.
I've read sentences in active voice that were clearly contortions around such advice and would have been much better as passive voice. They were usually, but by no means always, of the form without the by-clause.
Also, in English, a lot of people have got the idea into their heads that this applies to the imperfect tense, often from the likes of grammar checkers that warn about eliminating passives and don't seem to understand imperfect past.
Consider: "He was punched" vs "{subject} punched him" The two have quite different meanings, but a lot of grammar checkers warn about passive voice here.
But even if we take the past continuous passive, "He was being punched" has a subtly different meaning to "{} was punching him." As an author of literature, who was doing the punching might be stylistically omitted.
A good editor arguably should pick these contortions up, drastically improving writing; just as a good editor should pick up misused passive voice where active voice would be better. Sadly, editing time given to literature these days even by the better publishers is fairly cursory compared to some of the efforts of the past. The rise of easy-access self-publishing may have had an impact here, but the bar had already been significantly lowered by the pathological profit-obsession of big publishers.
It shifts the focus from the outcome to the action that a specific individual took.
Which, as you suggest, may or may not be what you want.
"Mistakes were made" types of construction are widely (and properly) mocked in many cases because they're viewed as evading responsibility. However, there are cases--such as having a post mortem of some sort--where you really do want to focus on what happened and how it could have been prevented rather "Joe kicked the power cord out."
> "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).
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.
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.
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.”
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?
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.
Depends on the advice. I'll definitely listen to advice from my wife on how to handle certain social situations because she is pretty good at giving advice to navigate social psychological situations.
Here was my stream of consciousness take on how to be a better writer, that became a popular Quora answer awhile ago:
1. Read, read, read, read, read, read. Everyone else said this also because it's true. But not just anything, read various styles of writing, and create a basic taxonomy of styles of writing that you can refer to mentally, in a mindset that's more like concentrated practice than just breezy reading. Pay attention to structure, tone, form, use of (or wilful disregard for) grammar, and cadences, etc.
2. Learn how to break down basic sentence structure. Know what a gerund phrase and subordinate clause are, or a sentence splice. You can ignore the "rules" but you need to know them.
3. Clarification to #2 that's the most important: identify instinctively the subject, verb, and object of your sentences. Every sentence has 'em, at least subject and verb. This isn't a firm rule but there's an excellent chance that your sentence's perceived meaning hinges on them, no matter how complicated. That last sentence by the way was "there" "is" and "chance" mind you, not the thing that looks like a sentence and follows the word "that." Now that you know what they are exploit them. Chances are there's a better verb than variations on "to be" like "is" "was" "has been" to be had, for one example.
4. Write. But don't just write whatever comes to mind (though you should do that too): write to form. Now that you're being observant of how certain styles are structured and their conventions you can try for yourself. Attempt to mimic the way certain kinds of prose are written.
Here are a few examples of the same thing in various styles picked at random:
"Triangle" - straight news format aka New York Times or AP style
> Wilson Phillips, an internet user from Skokie, Illinois, visited the popular online site Quora today in an attempt to learn how to write. In a visit Mr. Phillips described as "disturbing," site contributors were alleged to have committed several acts of hostility, including accusations he was an disgruntled former employee of Myspace, a claim Mr. Phillips denies.
"Time Magazine" - famous backwards construction used in features
> The clicks on the keyboard started out even, but soon picked up in speed. As comments were added, tempers flared. A voice rang out. "They should be so lucky as to work for Rupert!" it said, as minutes became hours. Broad daylight gave way to a dim monitor glow, and a grim realization took hold. It was almost midnight, and Wilson's secret was out.
"Gawker" - ie snarky news/blog style
> It looks like Wilson won't be getting off this island any time soon. Sources tell us the ex social-ite had a run in with the valley mafia late last night on Quora, which is quickly turning from a minor Mike Arrington masturbatory obsession into a digital mob.
"Gonzo" - Hunter S. Thompson, the master
> They're a vile bunch, mean on a good day and as vicious as a badger when cornered. And to them Wilson was prey. A life and reputation torn into meat and bone, the bastard never had a chance. Of course for predators that's the price of a meal, and he wasn't even the first that day.
The details matter. Ask most people to write the first sentence of a story about a run of the mill news event like a house fire and they'll probably do something like "A house on Main Street burned down today" when in real life those stories usually come at the news sideways. For example: "Broken windows and car alarms were among the unpleasant sights this morning at the site of a residential blaze that claimed three downtown homes".
And so on... you get the point. And that's just journalism; do the same with modern fiction, magical realism, classic literature, your favorite writers, etc. Once you can separate style from subject you hav...
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...), 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.
24 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadIf 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
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.
I’d formulate the passive thing as “watch out for the passive voice and try if an active reformulation sounds better.”
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.
I also agree with the grand-parent that as writing advice for literature it's bad advice. I'd also like to state that passives are a tool, and like any tool they can be and are misused.
I've read sentences in active voice that were clearly contortions around such advice and would have been much better as passive voice. They were usually, but by no means always, of the form without the by-clause.
Also, in English, a lot of people have got the idea into their heads that this applies to the imperfect tense, often from the likes of grammar checkers that warn about eliminating passives and don't seem to understand imperfect past.
Consider: "He was punched" vs "{subject} punched him" The two have quite different meanings, but a lot of grammar checkers warn about passive voice here.
But even if we take the past continuous passive, "He was being punched" has a subtly different meaning to "{} was punching him." As an author of literature, who was doing the punching might be stylistically omitted.
A good editor arguably should pick these contortions up, drastically improving writing; just as a good editor should pick up misused passive voice where active voice would be better. Sadly, editing time given to literature these days even by the better publishers is fairly cursory compared to some of the efforts of the past. The rise of easy-access self-publishing may have had an impact here, but the bar had already been significantly lowered by the pathological profit-obsession of big publishers.
Which, as you suggest, may or may not be what you want.
"Mistakes were made" types of construction are widely (and properly) mocked in many cases because they're viewed as evading responsibility. However, there are cases--such as having a post mortem of some sort--where you really do want to focus on what happened and how it could have been prevented rather "Joe kicked the power cord out."
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.
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).
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.
- 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
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.
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.”
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?
Other people’s stories however are almost always useful in some way, though not always in the way they intend.
1. Read, read, read, read, read, read. Everyone else said this also because it's true. But not just anything, read various styles of writing, and create a basic taxonomy of styles of writing that you can refer to mentally, in a mindset that's more like concentrated practice than just breezy reading. Pay attention to structure, tone, form, use of (or wilful disregard for) grammar, and cadences, etc.
2. Learn how to break down basic sentence structure. Know what a gerund phrase and subordinate clause are, or a sentence splice. You can ignore the "rules" but you need to know them.
3. Clarification to #2 that's the most important: identify instinctively the subject, verb, and object of your sentences. Every sentence has 'em, at least subject and verb. This isn't a firm rule but there's an excellent chance that your sentence's perceived meaning hinges on them, no matter how complicated. That last sentence by the way was "there" "is" and "chance" mind you, not the thing that looks like a sentence and follows the word "that." Now that you know what they are exploit them. Chances are there's a better verb than variations on "to be" like "is" "was" "has been" to be had, for one example.
4. Write. But don't just write whatever comes to mind (though you should do that too): write to form. Now that you're being observant of how certain styles are structured and their conventions you can try for yourself. Attempt to mimic the way certain kinds of prose are written.
Here are a few examples of the same thing in various styles picked at random:
"Triangle" - straight news format aka New York Times or AP style
> Wilson Phillips, an internet user from Skokie, Illinois, visited the popular online site Quora today in an attempt to learn how to write. In a visit Mr. Phillips described as "disturbing," site contributors were alleged to have committed several acts of hostility, including accusations he was an disgruntled former employee of Myspace, a claim Mr. Phillips denies.
"Time Magazine" - famous backwards construction used in features
> The clicks on the keyboard started out even, but soon picked up in speed. As comments were added, tempers flared. A voice rang out. "They should be so lucky as to work for Rupert!" it said, as minutes became hours. Broad daylight gave way to a dim monitor glow, and a grim realization took hold. It was almost midnight, and Wilson's secret was out.
"Gawker" - ie snarky news/blog style
> It looks like Wilson won't be getting off this island any time soon. Sources tell us the ex social-ite had a run in with the valley mafia late last night on Quora, which is quickly turning from a minor Mike Arrington masturbatory obsession into a digital mob.
"Gonzo" - Hunter S. Thompson, the master
> They're a vile bunch, mean on a good day and as vicious as a badger when cornered. And to them Wilson was prey. A life and reputation torn into meat and bone, the bastard never had a chance. Of course for predators that's the price of a meal, and he wasn't even the first that day.
The details matter. Ask most people to write the first sentence of a story about a run of the mill news event like a house fire and they'll probably do something like "A house on Main Street burned down today" when in real life those stories usually come at the news sideways. For example: "Broken windows and car alarms were among the unpleasant sights this morning at the site of a residential blaze that claimed three downtown homes".
And so on... you get the point. And that's just journalism; do the same with modern fiction, magical realism, classic literature, your favorite writers, etc. Once you can separate style from subject you hav...
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...), 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.