In which a Substacker advises writers to ignore writing advice. Come again?
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.
Continue reading “Some writing advice about writing advice”An important lesson: sometimes our efforts to connect with an audience fall flat.
It was great to be back on the Missouri S&T campus earlier this week to give the keynote talk for the university’s first Innovative Communication Conference. (Huge thanks to Dr. Jossalyn M. Gale, director of S&T’s Writing and Communication Center, for inviting me to speak.)
In my talk, I wanted to expand on the idea of the conference theme — “Innovation Requires Communication” — to emphasize the importance or storytelling in communication and innovation. I also wanted to impress on students the importance of embracing failure, and I needed a catchy title, something that would resonate with the mainly Gen Z audience, so I decided to borrow from 2023’s biggest pop culture event, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and call my presentation “The Errors Tour (Andy’s Version).”
Reactions to my cover slide were mixed. The older folks in the audience (read: faculty and staff) appreciated the wordplay. The students either smiled politely or remained expressionless. It seems they were over 2023 and all things Swift.
But …
Continue reading “Innovation, communication, and the Errors Tour”
Andy writes! 