Writing advice is everywhere, and most of it is correct. Write every day. Read widely. Cut what you don’t need. Know your audience. Show don’t tell. Find your voice. These are not wrong. Applied at the right moment, by the right writer, to the right piece, most standard writing advice will improve the work.
The problem with writing advice is not that it is incorrect. It is that it is decontextualised — offered as universal principle when it is almost always specific to a particular kind of writing, a particular stage of development, or a particular problem the advice-giver happened to have. Advice that solved one writer’s problem becomes a rule. The rule gets repeated until it feels like truth. And the writer who follows it faithfully, in a context where it does not apply, produces work that is worse for having followed it.
Why Writing Advice Gets Generalised
Writing advice generalises because writing is taught and discussed in communities — workshops, courses, online forums, writing guides — where generalisation is necessary. A piece of advice cannot be given to thirty writers in a room with the caveat that it applies to twelve of them and not the others. It gets stated as a rule, because rules are teachable.
The advice that generalises most easily is the advice that addresses the most common problems. Write every day addresses the most common problem: not writing enough. Cut ruthlessly addresses the most common problem with drafts: too much material, not enough precision. Know your audience addresses the most common problem with published writing: writing that does not consider the reader.
These are real problems, and the advice that addresses them is genuinely useful — for writers who have those problems. The writer who already writes every day does not need that advice; following it changes nothing. The writer whose drafts are already lean does not need to cut more; cutting further will damage the work. The writer whose instinct is always to over-explain the reader does not need to know their audience better; they need to trust the reader more.
The difficulty is that the writer receiving the advice cannot always tell which category they are in. The advice sounds universal. The context in which it does and does not apply is rarely given.
The Advice That Does the Most Damage
Not all writing advice is equally risky when misapplied. Some advice, followed wrongly, produces work that is slightly weaker. Other advice, followed wrongly, produces work that has been fundamentally misdirected.
The most damaging advice is the advice about voice. Find your voice, the advice goes — as though voice were something misplaced that could be retrieved by looking in the right places. The writer who takes this literally tends to produce one of two things: writing that is strenuously eccentric, in which the effort to sound distinctive is visible in every sentence; or writing that has been so thoroughly scrubbed of the writer’s actual habits and preferences that it sounds like no one.
Voice is not found. It emerges from sustained honest writing over time. The advice to find it is not wrong about the destination — a writer’s voice is something worth having — but it is wrong about the process. Directing attention towards voice tends to produce self-consciousness, which is the enemy of voice. The writers with the strongest voices are almost never the writers who were most focused on developing one.
The second most damaging advice is show don’t tell — not because it is wrong, but because it is so frequently misunderstood. It is advice about fiction, specifically about the difference between dramatising an experience and summarising it. Applied to essay writing, where telling is often exactly the right mode, it produces writing that circles around its point rather than making it — that accumulates detail in the hope that the reader will infer the argument rather than stating the argument and trusting the reader to engage with it.
What to Do With Writing Advice
The useful approach to writing advice is to treat it as diagnostic rather than prescriptive — as a prompt to ask whether a particular problem applies, rather than as a rule to be followed regardless.
When a piece of writing advice is offered, the question worth asking is: what problem does this solve? If the answer is a problem the current work actually has, the advice is worth following. If the answer is a problem the current work does not have, the advice can be set aside without guilt.
This requires knowing the work well enough to diagnose it honestly — which is harder than following a rule, but more useful. A writer who can identify what their work actually needs is in a better position than a writer who applies all available advice faithfully and hopes for the best.
Writing advice exists because writing is hard and writers want help. That is a reasonable want, and the advice is often genuinely useful. But the writer who follows advice without asking whether it applies to their work is not developing judgement — they are outsourcing it. And judgement, in the end, is what writing requires.
The best writing advice is the advice that teaches a writer to need less advice.