Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice
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For me personally, two things that determine if somebody is in a position to give me advice are:
1)Are they enjoying a level of success that I would like to achieve? 2)Is the environment in which they achieved success comparable to my own?
Other people’s stories however are almost always useful in some way, though not always in the way they intend.
I've always wanted to write, and I sought the help of some pretty good writers. They gave me great advice. But no amount of advice can be applied to a blank page.
So I wrote, pretty badly at first, you can see it on my blog.
Writing is hard. Imagine, you have an idea in your head, and you like it. You grab a keyboard and write it down, somehow you write something else, not the idea in your head. You have to force your brain to say what it means to say.
There is no problem with reading other's advice, as long as you have some writing to apply it to. However, in my case I benefit more from reading what those people write, rather then read their advice.
If you read a style guide like Strunk and White, you’ll come across a lot of nonsense. A particular bugbear of mine is the prohibition against passives, which is utter rubbish[0]. Don’t waste your time hunting down passives and split infinitives under the illusion that it will make your writing better. It won’t.
Which is very often exactly what people are after! People who aren't deluding themselves don't think they're going to win any Pulitzers, they just want a marginal improvement as a courtesy to others who will have to read it. If a style guide can elevate their writing to mundane levels, then it has done it's job.
As someone who writes for a living, nothing gets my goat more than a client asking me to remove the passive clauses in the 10,000-word ebook I've just written for them because they read that passives are bad in Strunk and White, or they pasted the text into Grammarly and got some squiggly lines.
There are some style books that offer advice that is both useful and true.
- Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker
- Artful Sentences: Syntax As Style, by Virginia Tufte
- Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner
If people really want to know what's what where grammar is concerned, they should look at "A Student's Introduction to English Grammar" by Huddleston and Pullum. Or, even better "The Cambridge Grammar of English" by the same authors (although at 1800 pages, it's not for the faint of heart).
He also argues against using the passive, because simple conjunctions/prepositions are replaced by longer than needed phrases that just shit up the pages. If you switch to active you can then write with more precision and cut more text out during editing. Other advice I found useful was to never edit as you write, or you'll never finish.
I also agree with the grand-parent that as writing advice for literature it's bad advice. I'd also like to state that passives are a tool, and like any tool they can be and are misused.
I've read sentences in active voice that were clearly contortions around such advice and would have been much better as passive voice. They were usually, but by no means always, of the form without the by-clause.
Also, in English, a lot of people have got the idea into their heads that this applies to the imperfect tense, often from the likes of grammar checkers that warn about eliminating passives and don't seem to understand imperfect past.
Consider: "He was punched" vs "{subject} punched him" The two have quite different meanings, but a lot of grammar checkers warn about passive voice here.
But even if we take the past continuous passive, "He was being punched" has a subtly different meaning to "{} was punching him." As an author of literature, who was doing the punching might be stylistically omitted.
A good editor arguably should pick these contortions up, drastically improving writing; just as a good editor should pick up misused passive voice where active voice would be better. Sadly, editing time given to literature these days even by the better publishers is fairly cursory compared to some of the efforts of the past. The rise of easy-access self-publishing may have had an impact here, but the bar had already been significantly lowered by the pathological profit-obsession of big publishers.
Which, as you suggest, may or may not be what you want.
"Mistakes were made" types of construction are widely (and properly) mocked in many cases because they're viewed as evading responsibility. However, there are cases--such as having a post mortem of some sort--where you really do want to focus on what happened and how it could have been prevented rather "Joe kicked the power cord out."
For example, on the page you linked to the first line of the body text reads:
> This example was created for training and is not official agency text.
The first clause of that sentence is in the passive voice — “was created” — and is a good example of how passives should be used. Nothing is gained by replacing it with:
> We created this example for training and it is not official agency text.
The passive version probably fits better in a Howto or manual that is focused on just communicating information in a neutral just-the-facts way.
The active version fits better with a style that's going for something more conversational.
I’d formulate the passive thing as “watch out for the passive voice and try if an active reformulation sounds better.”
I've found that if you want to be a good writer, you need interesting material to draw from. That can come from your imagination, your lived experiences, other material you've read, or most likely all of the above, but you're engaging in world building first and foremost. I particularly like this Faulkner quote:
“I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical. Most of the the writing has got to take place up here before you ever put the pencil to the paper. But the character’s got to be true by your conception and by your experience, and that would include, as we’ve just said, what you’ve read, what you’ve imagined, what you’ve heard, all that going to giving you the gauge to measure this imaginary character by, and once he comes alive and true to you, and he’s important and moving, then it’s not too much trouble to put him down.”
But writing advice is another thing entirely. Learning to think about your audience while writing is every bit as amenable to advice as learning to think about the processor's branch prediction while coding. Advice like "form a chain from stress position to topic position" (https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-sci...), or the "arcs of coherence" from Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style. Human perception processes language in understood ways. Conforming to those expectations requires learning from advice.
- if you are creating figures: research and be empathic to the real reasons why people act like they do. Observe life
- be aware of the functions certain words, phrases, sentences or sections fulfill in the system of your text
- become a good reader: if you’re sensitive to language, this can be your failsafe, it will protect you from writing things you didn’t intend
- Just write and don’t be afraid to throw things out.
- don’t overly rely on dramatic systems, because you will end up telling low impact predictable stories like everybody else