Rules of good writing you were taught - and do they work?

Another teacher warned me off two words: "nice" and "said" - we were expected to write loads of stuff like "He growled";"She muttered";"He laughed" etc etc. She was half-right about "nice" but the "said" thing is mental.

Short sentences was good advice. I think so anyway. Though long ones can be forgiven. The point is clear. Short sentences have more impact, supposedly.

Too *much* elegant variation gets tiresome: if you find yrself saying "the golden life-giving orb" rather than repeat "the sun" again, just go with the repetition, it's far less obtrusive.

Don't start sentences with "and" or "but": certainly don't start too many, but sometimes for drama you just have to.

"Sentences" without verbs are often more ambiguous than you think: this is good advice.

In straight news journalism, 'said' is U&K but let's not forget 'commented' and such. In any other form of paid writing where people are quoted, 'said' is RED PEN SPIKE DEATH, see show-don't-tell rule.

Whether or not a sentence is too long: can you read it aloud without pausing for breath?

when writing interviews etc, i tend to avoid the speech verbs altogether: also i don't follow suzy's point quite ("growled" eg is tell not show; show wd be only using quotes where you can tell how it was said from the content)

If I write a long-ish sentence I always try and follow it w/ a shortish one, although too many short sentences in a row starts to read like tabloid-parody.

As for measure and other technical apparatus, that¹s just common sense: if you¹re going to buy a of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.

I always find the transition between past + present (+ future) tense one of the most difficult tricks to pull off, and always try to avoid it within paragraphs (and sentences, obv.)

That's completely off the money as far as fiction goes, at least on this side of the pond. Do use said. Do attribute often enough that people don't forget who's talking. Do attribute using simple speech tags like "he said, while" and "she said, despite," rather than action tags, or the reader will realize you think you're clever.

Most of what I've learned from writing teachers has been how to avoid their bad examples. College creative writing programs are suspect, professors who foam at the mouth about prescriptive grammar moreso; neither does much more than prepare you to write for that specific subset of your potential audience.

that is red SCIMITAR spike death in my poor tormented head

But I might've meant pond! There's one ... near here ... it's been here and the UK. Oh, all right.

On the other hand, a prof of mine said she liked composing in her head, getting a good 7-8 sentence string down and then basically self-dictating. (Similarly, I always liked to find a dark corner and read my stuff aloud. I tried to do this with all my big finals in school and it always cleaned up dozens of things.)

In both of these was the implied lesson that whatever trick or method you find works, you should stick with it and don't let anyone fuck with your process. cf Costner to Sarandon in Bull Durham: "if you think you're on a streak because you're getting laid, or because you're not getting laid, then you are."

Check and double check. If you have any time left over, check again. Then put your pencil down quietly and wait for the bell.

- the professor for my writing workshop at Hampshire -- it wasn't an instructional thing, but he'd toss off comments from time to time: "Don't worry about grammar too much. Your narrative style is very voice-driven."

- Orson Scott Card: "Don't write a story when you get a good idea. Write a story when you get two good ideas that don't seem related, and write the story that connects them." It's a good tool for speculative fiction.

I have other personal no-no's that I will never use in my writing but that I don't think should be universally omitted. For instance, references to present day in-jokes, sitcoms, movies, kooky television commercials, etc. It pains me when I read another's writing and I see references to the taco bell dog, the ellen degeneres show, and slap bracelets. Some writers refuse to set their writing in the present day to avoid these obstacles. I, too, find it all too tempting.

I was also told to never start a sentence w/ a qualifier like 'However', 'Although' etc, which generally seems like gd advice.

Mrs. Sams was my best English teacher. She told us that if we felt like starting a sentence with "however" we should try putting it in the middle of the sentence ("what—at random?") and see how it played out. It does usually sounds better. "However, when putting from the left side of the green, his shots fell short" vs "When putting from the left side of the green, however, his shots fell short"

The not-repeating-the-same-noun thing seems like a bit of a trick.

if everyone followed the same rules for writing, they'd all write the same, and that would be boring

anyway, i shouldn't be here, this place scares me, i already spend too long in front of a computer, i'm trying not to get sucked in!...

Not if you're doing it right, they won't.

Really I want the reader to lock in and forget someone is writing, to feel as if they are somehow embedded in the story they're reading. And sometimes nothing other than 'chortled' is the right word to describe how the speaker is speaking. Anyway, in 95 per cent of reading situations, you can bet your bottom dollar that writer is more intelligent than reader. It's like art-hatas who think, 'I could have done that' when they never did (or would).

What I do ask myself is 'would a 16-year-old understand all of these words I'm using?' I've never, as a reader, thought a writer was being too clever, or thought I was less clever than them because of the words they used (Will Self, linguanerd, to thread). In cases where writing fails for me, it's because the work fails conceptually, structurally or as a story rather than at the dialogue.

I'm also a big fan of the show-don't-tell ideal, and when it comes to adverbs I'm even moreso. (Some of the writers I edit during my nighttime gig LOVE THE ADVERBS a little too much, to the point where I want to tell them to step back from the 'l' and 'y' keys.)

Some of what I learned during my abortive tenure in journalism school actually made me a *worse* writer. But some made it better -- tightening prose, etc.

I must say, though, that if you ever want to write features for the more competitive publications, they're going to change half of your saids to more descriptive terms for same, and you will have no comeback, so just learn how to drop other words for saying into the mix.

they'll remember looking up yer skirt, of course!

We also have StL spelling tests: Thurr, Herr, etc.

yeah, England's English is all wacky.

and also I thought it was really clever how bret easton ellis put in all those big lists of present day specific things in 'American Psycho' like Bruce Hornsby and the Range and stuff like that. that's in reply to what Mandee said. But maybe it was really dumb actually.

It is really tempting to write badly on this thread. Not that I am claiming I usually write like Hamlet but you know, I would normally hesitate frustrated over 'nice' and try to think of another word and delete 'really' but here, it seems appropriate.

'Nice stuff got said' now that is good. That rule about not beginning a sentence with 'I' is very elegant and un-American; I think I shall begin using it immediately. (Is it okay after a comma or a semi-colon? It seems like maybe the same thing would apply.) As a tutor teaching underneath a nasty American man we were supposed to force the students to avoid passive sentences and the textbook was full of sentences beginning with the horrible 'I'.

Most people do these things instinctively, but it's always shocking to me how loose a grasp most people have on punctuation. The rules for comma use, quotation marks, etc. were drilled into my head in high school, straight out of the Chicago Manual of Style. Nothing has made me feel more intelligent over the years, because apparently no one else was taught this stuff.

A trend I'm noticing that annoys me: someone thinks their sentence is really punchy, and that it warrants its own paragraph all by itself. It does not. Figure out whether it's the end of the last paragraph or the beginning of the next one. Almost no sentence is so incredibly pithy and meaningful that it belongs off all alone.

Look, if your editor agrees to publish it then it's not poor style, but I am not that editor. I've been editing a lot for Bookslut lately, and such stylistic flights of fancy have no place in a book review, sez me.

Having said that, page turners sort of depend on short sentences and one line paragraphs, don't they? Because then your eye just flies down the page. This is maybe a stupid thing to say BUT isn't it something to do with modernity that active/short sentences/paragraphs are so popular?

the few times i have written for major national newspapers (they couldn't find someone with a double-barreled name who could do it any worse) i've actlly found the quality of editing much more sensible - fine, everything gets hacked to bits but the general tone of pieces has been kept and it hasn't looked like i've just changed a buch of words usin microsoft word's built-in thesaurus... brit newspapers are also big on "said"!

You need thick skin, rather than a double-barreled name, to write for *any* newspaper. It's just that the neppos are already clued up to who is working where and know press life from dinner-table talk. And we're happy to hire plumbers who make the 'family business' a virtue. I've written for all the broadsheets bar the T'graph and the copy I submit is rarely altered. I'm not a news journalist, as they're far too [] for me, so my natural home is the features department, where one is allowed a freer hand with the more emotive speech adjectives. I've only had a small handful of pieces returned to me for revision in 12 years of paid writing work. As long as you submit your work to a comparison with the publication's style sheet, if applicable, before turning it in, and hit the word-count right on the nail, there's very little likelihood you will be subbed with a club. An editor that doesn't have to spend five hours trying to shorten or untangle a piece is going to use the person who wrote it again.

I have a great editor at the Independent who calls up to fact-check a piece before sending it off. She's really chatty and animated; she'll often ask for a clarification, we'll go into anecdote mode and she'll say 'right, I'm putting that in too'.

Clever Point/BUT(begins with dash)/continue Clever Point.

???

my editor has a curious prejudice against parentheses and ALWAYS substitutes dashes: i basically then change some of em back for variation and clarity (i don't much like that you can't instantly spot the opening and closing aspect of dashes-as-parentheses, so in a sequence of them will get lost as to which bits are "inside" them and which not...)

(it occurs to me that this ambiguity translates a bit into the subtle difference of meaning i guess i'm intuiting, but i'm not sure i could verbalise it)

(would i ever use parentheses within direct speech? yes, but i'd be more likely to use dashes - to me they translate a bit as "digression the hoof" as opposed to "clarificatory digression inserted later upon rereading"...)

Aw mama! This is some heavy shit. Most ppl don't have em and en dashes on their computer. But anyway:

arse-hatted=hyphen
pp12-15 = N
some directors - like Hitchcock - edit on the page = 2 x em

Okay?

i basically then change some of em back for variation and clarity

clariry itself!

i'd use the hyphen for the numbers also, and 2xn for the hitchcock, but that's cz two mag housestyles in a row have eschewed the m