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. But there were also a lot of good writing advice, which was really helpful for me. I've never had many problems with writing a creative paper, review, or something where I had a chance to represent my thoughts. But not a single piece of advice ever helped me when it came to more difficult research papers. I still have some troubles now. And from time to time, when I see that I try with no results, I go to
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