Some writing advice about writing advice

I had to snicker at the title of this post from Henry Oliver on his Common Reader Substack: Writing advice is a lie.

From there, Oliver offers some advice of his own. He tells us to ignore all that writing advice you see floating around Substack and in books. (Excluding his own, presumably.)

“Almost all of it is wrong,. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong,” he writes.

“Most of it isn’t going to teach you where to put your verbs or what a left-branching sentence is. Most of it isn’t going to teach you the tropes of rhetoric or the patterns of syntax.

“You won’t ever read the most important thing a writer can know, that grammar is logic.”

I can’t say I disagree with Oliver’s premise here. And I’ve read enough of his Substack to know he likes to be provocative. But I assume most writers already have the basics down. Weren’t we all required to read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in college? Maybe I’m mistaken, but I think a lot of writers are pretty hard-core grammar nerds. Beyond Strunk and White, we’ve read Dreyer’s English, Sin and Syntax, and various stylebooks, including the The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual and The Chicago Manual of Style.

Right?

Or am I an outlier?

As much as I love books about writing, I’m more of a sucker for books about grammar. That’s why over the past year I’ve read:

• An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!
• Writing with Style: The Economist Guide
• Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words

Each of these books digs into the logic of grammar and, to an extent, rhetoric.

But I confess I haven’t read any of the books Oliver mentions: “Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Fowler’s Modern English, Forsyth’s Elements of Eloquence, or any other primer of rhetoric.”

“Read as many of these as you need to so that you can practice the techniques you find there,” he writes.

Oliver concludes with advice I can get behind: “read as much actual good writing as possible. The best writing advice is actually reading advice.”

Yes and amen. Read voraciously. Read hungrily. Read excellent works of prose and poetry. And read a writing advice book or two if you like. Some of them are worth the time and effort. I won’t list my favorites here, but if you have any you’d like to suggest, feel free to sound off in the comments.

AI-generated image.