What's the worst writing advice you've been given in school?

One of my teachers said to never write a conclusion, your points should be clear in the body paragraphs.

Yeah, that maybe true but literally everyone that requires a paper is going to want a conclusion, whether necessary or not. It is better to be safe than sorry anyways. I just do not understand the overall point to not adding a conclusion. I genuinely think he just didn't wanna read as much.
 
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BeepBoopBeepBoop said:
It needs to be X amount of words.

For lazy students yes, but in your own work it doesn't. Unless you're being paid per word or per page keep it concise. I think requiring students to do a ten page report is why so many students suck at writing. Quota systems only lead to mediocrity.
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As someone who originally entered university for journalism before getting frustrated and switching to something not involving writing, I would upvote/like/agree with this a million times if I could. Your first actual journalism classes will teach you an economy of words and things like keeping the most important stuff at the top. With few exceptions like feature articles, you rarely have to write more than a couple pages. Your later courses, often done with the communication department, will essentially tell you to write again like you did in high school with a page or word quota and distinct "Introduction" and "Conclusion". After becoming an expert at getting the most meaning out of the fewest words and placing things based on importance, this is pure torture and the last page of any essay looks like a Kamala Harris speech.
I was a pretty decent writer on my own before becoming a journalism major and my writing had a flow to it that I don't think I ever got back. It doesn't help that I went into IT and Kiwifarms is one of the few places I actually write more than a paragraph.
 
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Went to university for litteraturen with a minor in artistic writing and one of the courses had a teacher, a published author, say and I quote;

"Try to be unique and think beyond your heteronormativity. A heteronormative author breeds cliches"

???????????

Edit:

Also i agree with the "x amount of words" advice being kinda retarded.

For me personally it lead to some mediocre school work because I often had to quote and repeat myself to or use a lot of words just to explain a very simple point.

I still have nightmares over the stress of trying to fill 10 pages about Freud's connection to Hamlet or 12 pages about some short story where some old man reveals to this nurse that he murdered her coworker and has made a steak out of her flesh, makes out with said steak and then gives the nurse a jar of bugs as a gift while she is busy thinking about her abusive boyfriend
 
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The only one I can remember is where I was told to avoid repetition. It is often misinterpreted, since " [...] I/he/she said" and such is fine to repeat a lot of times. You can switch a bit between "he" and "Bob", and between "said, asked, answered", but don't tie yourself into a pretzel language-wise.
 
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serious n00b said:
Meanwhile their homo self will not breed anything at all.....
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It's funny you say this because the professor was a straight woman. I guess she said this because that particular course had a bunch of radfems and a single non-binary person
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
"Fiction should be meaning and teach the reader lessons and educate and illuminate them."

No, fuck off. Pretend you're my drunken uncle and tell me a story how you and your buddies stole a chopper in The Nam and crashed it and were all so drunk you tried to blame it on a pig.
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100% agreed.
Maybe writers just want to tell a fucking story instead of trying to teach lessons and morals and shit.
 
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Manul Otocolobus said:
"Keep writing, you have a talent for it"
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Eh I actually think this is better advice than you're framing it. Just recalling your comments and how they read, you've got mastery of the basics a lot of professional writers fuck up. Just remember writing is art and there's a reason for the "starving artist" trope. You can be Tiger Woods with a keyboard and still die broke. That doesn't mean writing well isn't worthwhile. It also doesn't matter how much natural talent you have, you still need practice writing thousands of words to really hone your skills. Learning how to write arguments you don't believe or raising the quality of your more tenuous writing is where you develop skills that really set yourself apart.
 
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Safir said:
Anyway:
the worst creative writing advice I've seen, after "write what you know", is "the opening paragraph has to immediately grab the reader, so you should start in media res".
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In my opinion, the mistake in this advice is implying that in media res is the only good way to start your opening. Catching the attention of your reader with the opening is not only good, it is mandatory for good writings that sell. Basically all forms of media uses it. But the truth is, there are many ways to captivate your readers outside of in media res. If anything, what should have been taught is that the opening should eatablish what your writing is all about
 
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Everything needs to be structured in a certain way. You must have an introductory paragraph, two paragraphs with a topic sentence, evidence, and commentary, and a conclusion paragraph. No more and no less.
 
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Jet Fuel Johnny said:
"Fiction should be meaning and teach the reader lessons and educate and illuminate them."

No, fuck off. Pretend you're my drunken uncle and tell me a story how you and your buddies stole a chopper in The Nam and crashed it and were all so drunk you tried to blame it on a pig.
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Some of my best writing was written solely because I had a world or a story or some kind of image in my head, and I put it to paper. But I've also found that my best writing was subconsciously pushing towards a "moral" or a "lesson," in that while I was writing it, it was just a fun jaunt, but when I read it back I could see where I was going with it.
 
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A lot of good responses here. On the whole, Struck and White is a sacred cow here in the states:

https://archive.ph/hOrIA.

I would have to go through it to annotate and catalog all the horseshit statement and flat out errors. It is telling that this book has no currency whatsoever in Britain or anywhere else in the anglosphere.

Overall Hemingway and increasingly dumbed down prose is a most pernicious development. But not everyone has the native abilities to write well.
 
Diana Moon Glampers said:
Here are a few common ones:


"Keep all the paragraphs in an essay a similar length."

Paragraph and sentence length are the primary signpost used to help the reader understand relative importance and expected focus within a work. Long sentences and paragraphs invite skimming and are good for dense body copy, but bad when you're making big points. Short sentences -- or those punctuated in ways that set off important clauses -- give your reader a clue to slow down and read more carefully.


"Start by developing your thesis statement, then write your intro, your body, and your conclusion."

This is advice literally given to teach to the requirements of standardized writing assessments, where you have an hour or less to compose an essay. Once you graduate high school, you should never write this way again ... but college profs are often idiots who tell you to do this, too. I can't say how many profs I've seen who tell students to have their thesis statement and then start researching and writing an essay. What a backwards idea! How do you know your thesis before you've grounded yourself in some research? Write down some preliminary notes about how you think you feel about the topic, then start your research, then keep jotting notes down to start forming your thesis.

So, write a "placeholder" introductory paragraph when you think you've got something good, work through your body, and then the magic happens: you'll find that your conclusion may actually have a different thesis than your introduction. That is good! It means you've learned something -- taught yourself something! -- while writing your paper. Your conclusion will have your real thesis. Go back, delete as much of your placeholder introduction as seems prudent, and retool it with your new, more educated thesis in mind.


"To edit your work, go through it and fix the grammatical and spelling errors."

This isn't what editing is. That's proofreading, and it's the absolute final step before something goes out the door. Editing comes before proofreading. You start editing from the macro level and move toward the micro level. Start with a global read of your paper. Does it make sense overall? Does the body of the paper have arguments supporting your conclusions? Are those arguments backed with appropriate, convincing evidence?

Next, check your paragraphs and sentences. Do they flow well from one into another? Two exercises will help. #1: Read it out loud. This will genuinely help your ability to find sentences that end abruptly or seem to not flow correctly into the next sentence. #2: Print out your entire paper in a relatively big font (it may be a lot of pages). Cut it up: cut each paragraph out separately. Jumble them up. See what happens if you try to put it back together. Did you put it back together in the same order? If a paragraph seems like it doesn't flow or isn't focused within itself, cut it up further into individual sentences. See if you can put it in a different order to make it make more sense (possibly after changing some of the connective tissue to improve flow). Don't be afraid to delete some sentences entirely. Digressions may be true but they don't contribute to your actual argument.

Only after you've done this work at the overall argument, paragraph, and sentence level should you concern yourself with the more typical tasks of proofreading: grammar and spelling checks, punctuation, and so on. Don't try to do this step at the same time as the others. Do it after. You don't even know what you're keeping or where it's going until you've done real edits.
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I think those pieces of advice are familiar to most people.
In school, I had three different teachers, and each of them advised us "Keep all the paragraphs in an essay a similar length"
 
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