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

[Coelacanth]

One professor I had despised the fantasy genre to the point that he basically sat down and told me not to write any fantasy stuff because that was for kids and didn't offer anything meaningful to creative writing whatsoever.

He stopped talking to me beyond giving me critique for my work when I calmly told him that a lot of the classics professors get boners for could be classified as fantasy stories by today's standards.

 

[TurdFondler]

I god damned hate fantasy but what's wrong with writing a marketable genre? Also what's wrong with writing for kids?

Professors are honestly retarded

 

[Xarpho]

It involved a fictional updated version of the B-2 stealth bomber. I liked aeroplanes, I had plenty of books and magazines. I did research and incorporated technical details based on the B-2. "The 172 foot wingspan rolled out onto the runway." Shit like that which all good stories of this genre include.

Maybe I just don't read those types of books, and your teacher is still a jerk, but if I read a sentence like that, I'd suspect that the student was on the autistic spectrum.

 

[Screamer]

Maybe I just don't read those types of books, and your teacher is still a jerk, but if I read a sentence like that, I'd suspect that the student was on the autistic spectrum.

Nah, not an autist here. Just generally male being interesting in objects and things. Some people liked cars, I liked planes and shit. I don't think we had autism when I was in school.

Although this just reminded me of another time I got a teacher to lecture a class about how dumb my essay was, for reasons you'd also think I was autistic.

It was one of those classes where the teacher gave a topic and you immediately have to write a paper in class. It was about if we need space exploration if it's worth the cost etc. I of course was into space stuff, so it was right up my alley. I had heard all the arguments for space exploration many times.

For the bulk of the essay, I argued all the standard reasons. Then at the end moved on to the survival of the human species. Being multi-planetary and the solar system will one day not be habitable. It was just at the end, after all the present-day arguments as a final coda for the ultimate reason why space exploration is important.

In the next class, the teacher literally went on a massive rant about that specific section of my essay and how ridiculous and far fetched that argument was. It really triggered him for some reason. He went off on it like it was the most retarded thing he'd ever read.

My takeaway was that he was some commie, that was all, "space is a waste of money." He wasn't expecting anyone to make any good arguments. So there was my essay, where I could just regurgitate all the arguments much more intelligent people than I have made for space exploration. Which then triggered his commie brain. Which spazzed out at the final part about the survival of the species and the ultimate need for space exploration.

 

[MAPK phosphatase]

@Diana Moon Glampers already mentioned it, but it's the Introduction->Content->Conclusion form of essay writing. I hear that it's the standard because it's the easiest to grade, even though it's suffering to read. It wasn't until I took a technical writing class that many of these habits were really burned out of me. "Always consider your target audience" is among the best advice I've received, in addition to being told there are other, better ways to convey information through writing. Tell a story. Describe a scene, then end with an observation that ties it all together. Provide the information as simply and as straightforwardly as you can and leave it at that.

 

[NevskyProspekt]

Creative writing is basically pointless to teach in school. Most teachers have no fucking idea about writing and they'll critique the grammar endlessly without touching structural or stylistic issues.

I remember all through grade school and into high school being encouraged to write purple prose.

The strange thing about purple prose is there is very little middle ground regarding its quality. Some authors can go on extended, flowery, rococo descriptions of scenes and the text flows beautifully, while others attempting to do so cause borderline nausea. Ray Bradbury, when he was on a binge, was very, very good at purple prose. Two examples that come to mind:

“It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.” -Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight—Tomás shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck—tonight you could almost touch Time.”
― Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

 

[Andrew Neiman]

Show, don't tell.

 

[Slimy Time]

"Write how you speak because it's more natural to you, and then adjust for style/format" is apparently one that my younger sister was told. She asked me several times over the years to correct her papers/asked me for advice, and it was very painful to do so.

Imagine a teenager who talks non stop, but in written format? Whole paragraphs with a single full stop at the end and a lot of commas in between. Sentences that don't make sense at all or incorrect words being used. Endless use of filler words (basically is a big one). Just awful to read and very painful to correct. Thankfully she got better as she got older, and veered away from anything linguistic to STEM.

 

[Bloody Kotex]

Don't use semicolon. When I use a semicolon to join two related independent clauses, the teacher corrects it to either a comma or a period.

 

[Cool kitties club]

Overly structured essay writing. The idea that an introduction and conclusion should just restate your main point and that all paragraphs should be structured as topic sentence -> bridge -> point 1 -> reasoning 1 -> ... -> conclusion. Its the kinda stuff i expect in middle school when you are first learning formal argumentation but it was still being taught in my English 300 class in college. Its miserable to read and mind numbing to write. I prefer to simply divide my essays up by topic using subtitle and to just use as many paragraphs is necessary for that point. Along with using the introduction and conclusion as "mood setters" rather then simple summaries, someone is either going to read your essay or have just read it; no need to tell them all your points at once.

 

[Kerwin White]

Some writing advice is decent, a lot is obviously dumb. But honestly, you've got to figure this shit out for yourself. If you're not writing in your own voice, what's the fucking point?

 

[Retink]

Some writing advice is decent, a lot is obviously dumb. But honestly, you've got to figure this shit out for yourself. If you're not writing in your own voice, what's the fucking point?

School isn't about teaching people, they're about creating NPCs that write and speak in the voice of their programmers known as the media and politicians.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

For nonfiction, the five paragraph essay. If you're a normal Mongoloid like everybody else that's useful. If you're a natural at writing it's overly constraining.

I don't know that anybody takes this seriously, but the rising action / falling action model they teach kids seems like total bullshit, at least the way its shown graphically. Nobody writes a book with an extended section talking about what happened after it was all over. Your climax isn't in the middle. It's all a slow build (or, more technically, a wave with a trend) and then maybe a fall down a cliff if you count wrapping up.

 

[Shidoen]

“Fill er up white boy”

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

In grade 2 I was told I used 'said' too much.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

In grade 2 I was told I used 'said' too much.

Well, I can kind of see an argument there, you don't want dialogue to just be he said she said, sometimes people whisper, they shout, they holler, they bark, they yelp, they murmur, etc.

But people who don't know any better go so far with their said bookisms that it stops sounding like English entirely, which is the same problem as with any other synonyms.

I'd say people should use saidisms the same way they speak, naturally.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

Well, I can kind of see an argument there, you don't want dialogue to just be he said she said, sometimes people whisper, they shout, they holler, they bark, they yelp, they murmur, etc.

But people who don't know any better go so far with their said bookisms that it stops sounding like English entirely, which is the same problem as with any other synonyms.

I'd say people should use saidisms the same way they speak, naturally.

Sure, but does it really matter if an 8 year old uses said 90% of the time in a story about how the emus got its long neck? This was in the 90s when said as a dialogue tag was out of fashion and the teacher said it was repetitive and nothing more. From that point on I avoided said and used a random tag. No one corrected me even through high school. It wasn't until I began writing seriously 20 years later that it turns out I was right and had to learn to use said again since the eyes roll over it like punctuation when written correctly.

 

[The-Patriarchy]

Does "chop off your dick and balls" count as writing advice?

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Writing a biography on yourself.

 

[BelUwUga]

I had a creative writing teacher who completely banned the suffix "ing" because it was "boring" according to that psycho cunt. Like to the point that the previous sentence would have three bigass red Xs and "REWORD THIS!!!!" written on it. At best you sound like a cunt, usually just retarded, but sometimes it felt like you were fated to come across as a retarded cunt.