Rule 1 of Writing: Try Not to Sound Like a Doofus

Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled “7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School,” which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:

What is good writing?

Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They’ll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they’re really honest, they’ll admit it has a scholarly tone — prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could’ve been written by Willie Nelson scores a B (or worse).

Not all English teachers abide by this system, but the vast majority do. Just look at the writing of most graduates, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s proper, polite, and just polished enough not to embarrass anyone. Mission accomplished, as far as our schools are concerned.

And, really, right from the get-go, this goes off the rails. I mean, I’m not a big Jane Austen fan (I’ve probably read more Austen parody than actual Austen), but even I know that “scholarly” isn’t the right adjective to describe her narrative voice. Her narration is mannered, true, and archaic (due to being, you know, old), but it has personality– that’s half of the attraction of Austen, from what I can tell.

And, really, Willie Nelson? Way to target the Internet generation, dude.

A couple of list items in, he boldly advises people not to write like “Chaucer and Thomas More and Shakespeare” if they want to connect with people. While it is certainly true that writing in Middle English verse is rather distancing, I’m not sure it’s really necessary to warn modern students off iambic pentameter.

Those are really pretty indicative of the whole piece. It’s an impassioned argument, but I’m not entirely sure who it’s arguing against. I mean, I’m twenty years out of high school, and even I don’t recall any English teachers recommending that we write like Austen, or Shakespeare, or Chaucer. All of the examples have that same alternate-universe tone to them, as if the author is using the Star Trek script method and writing “Lit” whenever he wants a reference, then replacing those markers with names chosen at random from the index of a Norton anthology.

This third-rate Christopher Hitchens act wouldn’t be worth bothering with, if he stuck to advice that was merely slightly silly. Unfortunately, he goes past “silly” to “actively harmful.”

5. Leaning on sources

[A] lot of teachers care more about solid research than original ideas. They don’t want to see daring and inventive arguments, challenging the foundation of everything we hold to be true and arguing boldly for a new worldview. To them, it’s much more important that you understand the ideas of others and be able to cite them in MLA format.

But real life is the opposite.

Go around citing the sources of all of your ideas and people will start avoiding you, because it’s boring as hell.

See, this is a problem. The silly stuff about style and tone is fine, but this is really bad advice in any context more formal than a blog post.

Knowing and citing sources is important, because that’s how other people know you’re not talking out your ass. And it’s also how people know you’re a smart person in your own right, and not just stealing the good ideas of others.

People who write for a living will lose their jobs over failing to cite sources. They’ll be embarrassed in the media, and even sanctioned in court. Don’t believe me? Ask Steven Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. If you have any intention of becoming someone who gets paid to write things, this is absolutely terrible advice.

Ultimately, the Copyblogger is falling into the same trap as the English faculty he is semi-competently railing against– stripped of the silly mistakes, his article is basically a complaint about people who apply rules appropriate for one type of writing to a different context. It is absolutely true that the rules and standards that apply when you’re writing a school essay should not be held as absolute, graven-in-stone commandments that apply to all writing, including dopey contrarian essays on the Internet.

(Whether this is interesting is open to debate, but it’s unquestionably true.)

At the same time, though, the rules and standards that apply to writing blog posts for the short-attention-span crowd do not translate well to other contexts. Yes, proper citing of sources will bore Fark readers to tears, but failing to cite sources in a professional context leads to large out-of-court settlements and the loss of your cushy pundit job.

The real rule of writing is this: there are different rules for different types of writing. If you have any delusions of being someone who earns money by writing things, you’ll learn multiple different ways to write, and how to apply them to the appropriate contexts. My style here on the blog is different than what I use in the book, which is different than the style I use in the book, which is very different than the style I use in scholarly articles. Hell, the style I use here is different than the style I use when I’m guest-posting on another blog.

There are some rules that are universal, of course: have a point; organize your writing so as to make your point clear to the reader; don’t use words whose meaning you’re not sure of. Lots of the other “rules” in writing are context-specific, and apply only to one type of writing. Part of the process of learning to write is learning which rules apply in which contexts.

I’d say that “know and credit your sources” is closer to a universal rule than a context-specific one, though. You don’t want citations to bog down your writing, but even on blogs and social media, it’s important to give credit where credit is due.

And one rule that’s definitely a universal is this: Try not to write things that make you look ridiculous. Even when you’re writing contrarian blog posts.