Ten rules for rules for writers
Note: This essay was inspired some time ago by an online discussion about jargon and seniority, as well as by discussions about academic writing in which I found myself qualifying my recommendations by acknowledging that power and authority deformed them.
But I didn’t write anything until I came across V.S. Naipaul’s narrow, contradictory rules for writers. In order to write something more transparent and cognizant of the realities where writers of all stripes live, I played around with bending the “rules for writers” genre that imagined the rule writer as the truly naive one.
I am posting this now after a recent burst of prescriptions for writers on Bluesky. My essay isn’t a critique of any of them but hopefully serves as a complement.
Let’s say that you, a successful, experienced person, want to secure your legacy, part of which involves passing along your wisdom about writing for people at the beginning of their journey. You’ve learned so much. You’ve seen so much bad writing. You feel that what you’ve gained has come through your skills as a communicator, and you’d like to pass those lessons along. Maybe you are, in fact, a professional writer.
As someone who has read a lot of rules for writers (or advice aimed at them), and as someone who thinks a lot about how to teach people to use written language to communicate, I have a few things that you should keep in mind as you boil down your wisdom. Hopefully these will help your first foray into giving tips to writers.
The foremost consideration: the world of writing and reading isn’t the same one you came up in. Nowadays, people write and read differently with different tools and streams of information than the ones you had. The entire ecology of literacy is more slippery and complex, even while seeming to offer frictionless simplicity. If you consider all of the digital environments in which we live our lives, people already write more than they used to. In so doing, they will have discovered for themselves that diverse audiences have diverse needs, and that each has its own conventions. They might already be deft at navigating these conventions, as well. Their command of any single convention may not be perfect; they may not understand a hierarchy of conventions (and, if they do, not the same hierarchy as you bring).
That’s not the only change. Because of the internet, they’ll have already encountered a considerable amount of writing and communication feedback and advice of all flavors, shades, and levels of sophistication (and quality). That feedback will have taken many forms, including informal ones like trolling, tone policing, and calling out, which sometimes demand someone to stand up and defend their expressions in content and form. In short, you probably won’t get far by parroting truisms and platitudes. You have to be more savvy and sophisticated.
Time and time again, I’ve encountered rules, tips, or advice for writers that aren’t very aware of these broader, shifted ecologies or other dynamics. Some of these lists of tips come from famous writers of the past (such as this one by Henry Miller or this by V.S. Naipaul); others come from business or thought leaders – I’m not exclusively talking about literary writing here. And while some of the advice is genuinely helpful, it’s not as comprehensive as I think it should be. New times, new wisdom.
So to keep you from looking like a fossil from earlier times, and to help you make your desired impact, I offer some rules you should always follow when you give writers some rules.
Rule 1: Acknowledge the role of power and authority.
Whether it’s tips, advice, or rules that you’re offering, they won’t operate in a vacuum; they’re going to live and breathe in contexts where there’s accountability and consequence from formal and informal actors. That’s why it is crucial for you to explicitly reference power and authority, especially if you’re framing your tips as “rules.” For whom do your rules hold all of the time, for whom some of the time, and for whom never? Who gets to bend or break or ignore the rule? Power is always operative here. You can’t pretend that it doesn’t.
In the frictionless dream world of advice givers who aren’t as sensitive as you are, all writing performances are evaluated with the same standards. Your readers will immediately recognize that this isn’t the real world they occupy. They may be beginning writers, but they’re not naive. You should root your advice in the ways of the world and how it really works.
Let me give you an example. One frequent piece of advice, particularly in professional fields, is for writers to avoid jargon, to write simply, and to choose words they would use in spoken conversation. “Jargon” consists of words which may be required for technical precision but which are often wielded to draw borders between groups. If you can correctly interpret the label or term, you’re in; otherwise, the door stays in your face. In this view, jargon should be avoided.
In actual fact, the ability to perform to this standard is often an artifact of one’s stature and accrued authority in a field or community. You remember what it was like -- when you were coming up, you had to use the current in-language of your profession accurately and effectively. That probably played an important role in how you got to where you are now. Only later, when you had accrued power and authority, could you write plainly and jargon-free. That’s because you could easily pay the the costs of writing without jargon, if there were costs. A junior member doesn’t have such power.
This same dynamic could hold true for many rules and tips, about the use of slang, emojis, or non-English words. You might want to state where your rule holds, and if it holds in all cases, and how much consensus lies behind your prescription.
Rule 2. Disclose your personal commitments to certain types of language.
Writing guides and handbooks often stress the importance of simplicity, clarity, or transparency, but they often don’t disclose the ideological commitments that those language prescriptions are built on. I’m not saying that simplicity is undesirable; I’m saying that people deserve to know why you prize it. Is it about egalitarianism? Accessibility? Traditionalism? Tell that story. Go ahead.
You might also ask yourself (if you don’t regularly reflect on this), why do I prefer a certain type of language? It’s important to keep in mind that prose styles have histories. Sometimes prose styles originate from the needs of a specific group of people at a particular point in time, and only later do these become more generally applicable, often through the exercise of power. (See Rule 1.) The plain style in English, for instance, has its roots in the early days of science communication, when scientists who belonged to the Royal Society of London committed to writing about their experiments as if there were no “I” observing them – a commitment to objectivity, in other words, that has proven to have other implications and consequences. I realize that the dominant style of scientific writing has evolved (and continues to do so), but my point is this: We have inherited linguistic practices whose inherent desirability we take as natural only because we don’t know anything about the circumstances that shaped those prescriptions, which may not be so relevant for us now.
The point is, there are many ways to serve the interests of groups of readers, and to do that, writers have choices. So what do they choose, and why?
Rule 3: Reference all the levels of discourse.
It’s also important that your advice references how writers can serve readers at all levels of discourse, including word choice, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and formatting. (Maybe you're writing only about word choice -- in that case, it's okay to stick to that.)
Maybe word choice and sentence length are important parameters of good writing for you, but they’re not the only ones. Yes, V.S. Naipaul can write, “The beginner should avoid using adjectives, except those of colour, size and number,” because he’s V.S. Naipaul (see Rule 1), and Elmore Leonard can tell you “Never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose,’ because he’s Elmore Leonard (see Rule 1 again), but writing involves more than selecting words in a linear fashion. Which those literary giants would probably acknowledge if they were pushed on the narrowness of these ideas.
Let me back up: I often say that there are three dominant metaphors often used to describe good writing, each corresponding to a state of matter: good writing is clear (which is the gaseous state of matter); good writing flows (which is a liquid state); and good writing holds together (which is the solid). Feel free to use these for yourself–I admit, they’re pretty good.
One thing I’ve noticed is that most rules for writers are biased, for some reason, to the gaseous metaphor, which is too bad, because it produces fairly vague prescriptions. There are no devices of clarity, which also can’t be measured. So saying that something isn’t clear is fairly subjective, and is also something I see wielded in a spirit of deliberate obtuseness.
Meanwhile, the liquid metaphor offers a bit more concreteness, but it’s similarly vague and subjective. You can guess where this is headed: I want to argue that the solid metaphor, which gets you to the elements of cohesion of writing, is preferable to the others. Why?
One reason is that I can point to the devices and effects that create cohesion at the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and piece level; I can use those measures both critically as a reader and productively as a writer; and it lends itself to actionable diagnoses and concrete recommendations. One small example is the demonstrative pronoun “this” as the subject of a sentence. Often the diagnosis is that this usage is unclear. To what does “this” refer? It’s a correct diagnosis, but that and its remedy lie in a device of cohesion: turn the demonstrative pronoun into an adjective and provide the referent of the pronoun, thereby tying the sentence back to an earlier point in the discourse. The underlying function here is about cohesion, and has something to do with the relationship between how people actually process language and specific instances of written language. You may or may not agree that talking about transparency or fluid continuity doesn’t offer the same.
If you think in terms of cohesion, you can’t avoid talking about how words contribute to the cohesions of sentences, and sentences to paragraphs, and so forth. Just as writing isn’t the linear organisation of words, reading isn’t a process of linear decoding; it’s a nonlinear process of model building that relies on linguistic units of various types, and it’s the readers’ encounter with this linearity that helps build their mental models. That’s cohesion.
If you’re only mentioning words, you’re not helping as many people as you could.
Rule 4. Be sensitive to conventions within and across communities.
While all readers need broadly similar things, they will possess varying expectations and sensibilities about good writing and how it behaves that originate in the community they belong to, the purposes and functions of writing in those communities, and the genres they most frequently encounter. (See Rule 2 – prose styles have histories.)
It is obvious that hot trends in poetry don’t apply to STEM research reports and vice versa, but less discernible community boundaries also exist inside poetry communities and STEM domains, even though they may be harder to spot. I’m not going to get into a discussion about the importance of shared standards in fragmented social environments, except to say that any standard that you champion should be checked against the lived realities and expectations of communities of writers and readers.
To put it a different way, use your energy to remind writers how to use the linguistic resources they possess for serving their actual readers, not the abstract ideal reader who exists only in your head.
Rule 5. Reference all the stylistic options.
If you follow Rule 4, it will mean you should also address all of the stylistic options that those writers can have available for serving their actual readers. This is the point of Winston Weathers, an English professor and writing teacher, who published a book in 1980 that argued that students should be taught the full range of stylistic and structural options for use in their expository prose, such as lists, sentence fragments, hyperlong sentences, double-columned paragraphs, and unusual word choice (to create a characteristic now known as “bursty”). He called these options Grammar B, as opposed to the Grammar A of traditional modes.
Now, I realize that you’re putting together a list, not teaching a whole course, so perhaps you can point to the existence of other stylistic options and leave the writer to decide among them. After all, even knowing that a broader palette exists is itself a valuable wisdom.
Rule 6: Don’t count things.
In V.S. Naipaul’s “Rules for beginners,” rule number 1 is “Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.” You will notice, counting the words in his sentence, that he has violated his own rule. (Though he’s not a beginner – see Rule 1 above.) It’s easy to imagine that he tacked on “or twelve words” after being alerted to this himself. Anyway, the point is not to give quantitative limits to linguistic things because you will inevitably be caught breaking them, which will be embarrassing.
More importantly, in the long run, quantitative limits like Naipaul’s don’t help writers. They rob writers of the opportunity to develop their own intuitions (just like grammar checkers on word processing programs). If you have an intuition or experience that lies behind your recommendation about the number of words in a sentence, then articulate that. Most likely, that intuition comes from hard-won experience and makes up the core of what you really want to say about communicating.
Otherwise, if you make some number stand for that intuition, people will inevitably misinterpret that limit and apply it rigidly in all the cases, and suddenly everyone’s paragraphs will be four sentences long and essays five paragraphs long. This rigidity is probably what you wanted to avoid all along. Don’t promote it.
Rule 7. Make heuristics, not algorithms.
Keeping in line with Rule 6, spread the useful heuristic, even if it’s harder to learn and difficult to apply, rather than the hard and fast rule or algorithm. Elmore Leonard does this when he says, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” This is his last tip, however; all the others that he gave are highly specific and algorithmic, such as “Never open with the weather.” Inevitably some writers take these as elements in a recipe.
Rule 8. Encourage accessibility.
Accessibility is a value that underpins good writing in the 21st century that you should acknowledge in your advice to writers.
When I began my writing career (writing a column for a local newspaper when I was 13 years old), no one talked about accessibility and writing, and all through my formal education, until my PhD in 2000, I don’t recall hearing or thinking much about user-centered writing. Sure, there was a lot about the accessibility of ideas and information, and about audience in the rhetorical sense, and about clarity as a good feature of writing. But I don’t remember anything about clarity for whom, or why, or anything about varieties of clarity. You may have had similar experiences.
Over the last couple of decades, however, pushed by efforts to make digital information on the web more accessible as well as legal and cultural efforts aimed at expanding access and inclusion, there’s been a push to write legal, financial, and government documents in what’s known as “plain language.” If even cognitively typical, healthy, educated adults have a hard time getting through legal language, imagine the obstacles faced by someone who is aging, isn’t well educated, isn’t a native speaker of the language, or has an intellectual impairment. The argument is that citizens cannot participate in decisions that affect them if they don’t understand the language describing it. Communications during the coronavirus pandemic about safety, public health, and vaccinations have also underlined the fact that we’re all safer when everyone understands what’s going on.
See Rule 2 above. You might use inclusion and accessibility as a reason that you promote certain writing decisions.
A sub-rule here is that you shouldn’t assume your readers are native speakers of the English language. It’s tempting to do this, especially if you are one yourself, but keep this in mind: there are now more non-native speakers and readers of English now than native ones. Not only is English a global language, which means, among other things, a global audience, but someone who wants to have global impact will need to acknowledge that global audience. The people reading your tips will be from all over.
Now, this rule intersects with others on this list, especially Rules 1 & 3, in that some fields and genres will likely have more non-native readers than others. I’m thinking of writing in STEM fields but also international business and even journalism. It also intersects with questions of power when it comes to making language accessible.
Rule 9: Include rules for reading.
Writing is part and parcel with reading; to be a good writer, you also have to be a good reader, so make sure to explicitly prescribe types of reading practices for the writer. I don’t mean genres or formats; I definitely don’t mean specific authors. And of course I don’t mean reading for a certain number of hours or a number of books (see Rule 6). I like Annie Proulx’s advice: “Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.”
I’m really talking about attention. In our new environments of reading and writing, especially online, where the fighting for attention is immediately rewarded by likes and re-posts, we should be careful to monitor what we do with our own attention, even as we presume upon the attention of others. You should give people the advice that if they think they’ll find readers for their novel, they should be reading novels, not Twitter.
Rule 10. Finally, respect that writing is a mode of language different from others.
Avoid making rules that claim that good writing = speaking (or vice versa). From a linguistic perspective, this is wrong. It’s also bad advice.
It’s fine to encourage people to read their prose aloud when they’re revising. But all types of writing are distinctly different from spontaneous uses of language, whether spoken or signed, which has been shown over and over in linguistic research that looks at large samples of each.
For one thing, most spontaneous language happens in conversation between two or more people. Yes, people talk to themselves, and yes, people monologue, but these uses are quite infrequent. The structure of the conversation influences the sort of language that’s used, from the kind of words that are used to the length of the utterances.
Importantly, spoken language isn’t really the way you think it is. When someone like Elmore Leonard says, “if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” they’re using their own ideas of what “spoken” and “written” language are like – not what it’s really like. Many of the features of spoken language you wouldn’t actually want in your writing, like sentence restarts or repetitions of words or long pauses.
The same goes for sentences. It’s not that sentences are most often short in speech, it’s that most spoken utterances aren’t sentences at all. Very few writers can get away writing like that for very long. Very few can do it well.
So Leonard is referring to a style of language that seems oral but is actually closer to writing.
Bonus Rule: End in Perspective.
Don’t just finish up writing your rules and walk away – tell us how compiling the list changed you. What do you think now about writing, or writing advice, or expertise, that you didn’t before?
For my part, I wish that I’d included in the list you just read more about process, which is another realm where people seem to have infinite wisdom and experience–including myself. I wish I had proposed something about analyzing one’s own writing with machine analysis – does any given body of your own work follow your own rules?
It also occurs to me that the process of coming up with rules might even be more generative than operating by rules, and so like Whitman with his poems or Montaigne with his essays, I’ll probably be coming back to revise this many, many times over.
