Category: Writing Advice

Despite spending most of my life writing, I have never won any awards or accolades for writing and have no reason to think that I am an especially good writer.

I say this not because I’m fishing for you all to tell me that I am actually not a bad writer etc., but to tell you that despite writing being an obsession of mine in which I read many how-to write guides, produce the occasional one or two myself as well as try to deconstruct writing I consider good (or bad) to reverse-engineer results, reaching the exalted heights of the greatest writers… hasn’t happened for me yet.

Worse than that, though, is the fact that not all writing advice that is out there is good.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

In the past, I have been bamboozled by a mainstream of writing advice that has been propagating through these how-to-write guides for decades. So bamboozled that I even recommended two of the best-known ones to students. I regret those recommendations, because I have discovered there is a hidden racist thread in that writing advice that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Some decades ago, I found out that apparently everyone interested in improving their English writing should read two things: a short book called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and an essay called “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell. I did so. I passed the references on to my students. I edited work that writers trusted to me with Orwell and Strunk & White in my mind. And I edited my own work that way. The result? Wasted years during which my writing suffered, especially when I wrote for academic audiences who have no interest in Strunk, White, or Orwell. I wasn’t getting rejections because I was a bad student of writing, but because I was too good a student of Strunk & White and of Orwell.

Strunk and White, Orwell, and their predecessors produce writing advice in short, simple rules – modeling, of course, the advice they give writers. You may have seen them. Here are a few from E.B. White (of Strunk & White): Use active voice instead of passive. Use the positive form instead of the negative. Omit needless words.

Orwell will tell you to avoid dying metaphors, operators like “militate against”, pretentious diction (science words, adjectives, old words, foreign words). He says:

“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”

If you are a sincere student who reads these essays and tries to implement them as I did, your writing will suffer. So will your readers. Because these pieces of advice, presented as universal truths about the english language, are audience dependent at best, and useless at worst. They aren’t even guidelines that are good in most situations but bad in others. They are just White preferences (and Orwell preferences). What they like to see. The style they like to write in.

Telling writers to write short simple sentences with monosyllabic words is older than Orwell or White, who probably got their material from American businessman Robert Gunning’s 1944 book, The Technique of Clear Writing. He has 10 principles: 1. Keep sentences short. 2. Prefer the simple to the complex. 3. Prefer the familiar word. 4. Avoid unnecessary words. 5. Put action in your verbs. 6. Write like you talk. 7. Use terms your reader can picture. 8. Tie in with your reader’s experience. 9. Make full use of variety. 10. Write to express not impress.

Gunning provides a list of 3000 words writers should stick to and includes a quantitative set of “readability yardsticks” for writers to use. He recommends writing to what he calls a “sixth-grade level” and recommends a “fog index”, a formula that combines sentence length and percentage of polysyllabic words (similar to the Flesch Readability Score and other such indices). Charles Kay Ogden, author of a book called Uncontrolled Breeding, or Fecundity versus Civilization (1916), provided a list of 850 “Basic English” words to stick to for readability.

Gunning also cites Herbert Spencer’s book The Philosophy of Style, which explained that “a reader brings to your writing limited mental power.” Spencer spread philosophies beyond those of writing style: he was big on measuring skulls to determine intelligence and wrote pieces of English prose like this one: “The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way. … Be he human or be he brute – the hindrance must be got rid of.”

Since we’re talking about Herbert Spencer, it’s time to return to what I mentioned earlier: a racist strain running through too much of this English prose advice. It has to do with a 19^th century obsession with the idea that pure Anglo-Saxon England was conquered by the Normans in medieval times and in addition to corrupting the pure vigorous Anglo-Saxon blood, the Normans corrupted the vigorous Anglo-Saxon language. This idea of getting back Anglo-Saxon racial purity through the use of short sentences filled with single-syllable words is explicit in the likes of Herbert Spencer and reproduced by White and Orwell etc., without acknowledging where the racialist passion for monosyllables comes from.

University of Chicago academic John Williams, in the 1995 writing book Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, talks about the Norman conquest and its effects on English – thankfully, without the racial nostalgia. Williams’s analysis is that because medieval English lacked words for translating and doing business and government, these words were imported from Latin and French. 16^th century Renaissance scholars brought in Greek and Latin for classical texts. The result is that 80% of daily words come from Anglo-Saxon, while in more technical fields, there are more French- and Latin-origin words. The result: Depending on what you’re writing about, it could simply be impossible to choose the single-syllable Anglo-Saxon word, which might not exist. As Williams quotes “there ys many wordes in Latyn that we have no propre Englysh accordynge thereto”.

In addition to racialist nostalgia, these style guides bring to the writer the advice given to every sales force: pander. But pandering ignores one of the main reasons that readers read: to learn new things, including new words! When I read, I look for writing that has as much new (to me) material in it as I can handle without getting overwhelmed. New words, new ideas, new combinations. I don’t pick up a book looking to read the same 850 words in the shortest possible sentences.

Anyway you can do propaganda in small words and short sentences just as well as you can in big words and long sentences (maybe better). Orwell inverts this reality in his “Politics and the English Language”, arguing that “plain english” is inherently less deceptive. “Bad writers… are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,” he says. But this isn’t true. It took Trump’s mastery of plain english for liberals to take notice, but they eventually did.

If you’re not pandering and you’re not trying to recapture teutonic vigor the better to help your superior race rule the whole world, then all of the White-Orwell rules go out the window. Short words aren’t better than long ones. Short sentences aren’t better than long ones. Anglo-Saxon words aren’t better than Latin ones. Language is an infinitely creative system endowed to us by miraculous accidents of evolution over millions of years. How degrading to confine ourselves to 850 short words!

No, writing is a relationship between people. A social relation. To be meaningful, advice about writing is advice about this relation. You can be cynical about it and follow University of Chicago writing centre director Larry McEnerney, who tells graduate students

that the writer’s job is to solve a problem for the people with power in their field. You can follow Virginia Tufte and reverse-engineer hundreds of sentences to see what makes them good. The way I think about writing now is as a research phase where you find the resources you need, a first draft phase where, as McEnerney advises, you actually use the writing of the first draft to figure out what you think, and a revision phase where you rewrite the whole thing with your reader in mind.

Instead of thinking of writers as pretentious Latins who don’t use enough simple vigorous Anglo-Saxon words, think about writers as working to reach specific readers with their language. Then you will understand more about how propaganda works than Orwell wanted you to. When the New York Times says that a missile “finds” cafe patrons watching soccer, that’s not because they’re too stupid to use the active voice: it’s because they are connecting with NYT readers, who want to know what is happening in Israel/Palestine in a way that is palatable to their pro-apartheid commitments. Thinking of this as bad writing by stupid writers leads to feelings of smug superiority. That’s fine where Orwell lives but it’s a luxury we (ie., the anti-apartheid side in this case) cannot afford. Time to dump Strunk, White, and Orwell.

Before Fernwood published Siegebreakers, I was so desperate to “get published” as a fiction writer that I followed every piece of advice I found in books and online, even advice that was self-contradictory. 

One piece of advice, for example, about twenty years ago, was to never submit manuscripts to publishers directly. You had to find a reputable literary agent, and most publishers only looked at work from agents. So, I looked at more online resources, bought various Writer’s Market publications, and started a process of desperation and supplication to get the attention of a literary agent. 

It worked well: Instead of racking up rejections from publishers, I was racking up rejections from agents, which led to ever weirder experiences. One agent said he liked my submission, scheduled a phone call for months later, and ghosted me after the phone call (I guess there was something he didn’t like). It seemed agents liked to be polite, so they would rather find ways to politely ghost you than to write the kind of rejection letters academics are used to getting from journals (“a rather pedestrian study”, was the favorite rejection comment I got for one of my early scientific papers). 

But one rejection was maximally revealing about the state of the world for writers. One agency rejected me after the standard 12 weeks, then put me on a mailing list for one of the courses they run for writers on how to get published! There are literary agencies out there that make money off of courses teaching writers how to increase their chances of getting published. What’s even worse: years later, I took one of their courses! In the course, a group of writers communicated with each other, and gave one another feedback on writing, and at the very end, one of the agents gave one or two sentences of summary feedback to each writer. Finally, I think one writer was selected to pitch their manuscript to the agents. We writers paid a literary agency (handsomely), whose job it is to find publishers for writers and take a fee, so that we could give one another feedback on our writing. 

How did it come to this? Because money flows in this industry not from readers, not to writers, but from writers and to those who give them the false promise of “publication”. 

But it has been decades since the time when a writer, in order to be read, needed a publisher to work on a printing press with ink and paper to be read. It has been decades since the time when those publishers, who wanted to make sure they made profits off of selling those paper-and-ink products, had to be careful gatekeepers, rejecting most manuscripts and assigning editors the work of improving the lucky few that were chosen. 

That isn’t how it works any more, writers. Today you join the other billions with an internet connection and put your words up somewhere – probably in some space owned by one of the tech giants. What, then, is this mystique of “getting published” that writers are being sold? It is nothing other than any other promise of fame and fortune. 

It turns out the less meaningful the service offered (“publication” of words you can put out in any of a hundred places on the web within seconds of logging on?) the more intensely the service is marketed to writers – who should be the sellers, not the buyers. 

Writing isn’t the only thing that has gone this way. Money is made by teaching people how to become yoga teachers, not by teaching yoga. Money is made by teaching people how to become life coaches, not by coaching people how to live their lives. The best though is of course the online courses that teach you how to make money making online courses! Such courses do exist. 

And yet, I have to admit that the most valuable advice I found about how to understand our current publishing landscape came from an author of a how-to book about how to make money creating how-to books. This author, John T. Reed, has self-published a novel called The Unelected President about what happens when “Mike Medlock, a libertarian, non-politician accidentally becomes president of the United States while serving out a dead senator’s term.” I’m the author of the Anti-Empire Project. I don’t see eye to eye politically with John T. Reed, whose novel blurb ends: “ There’s a new sheriff in town, and the North Koreans, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Chinese, and Russians are very unhappy about that.”  I would, no doubt, also be unhappy about Mike Medlock being the new sheriff in town. 

Nevertheless, I have always believed that insights can come from anywhere and anyone and what anti-imperialist doesn’t have at least one uncle with John T. Reed’s politics? At any rate, Reed sold me his How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book. I sent him the payment. He had the book printed and bound. And his family operation had it shipped to me (at my expense). And my favorite line in the book was (from memory, because I loaned the book to a friend): “There are two kinds of publishing: vanity publishing and self-publishing.”

For as long as there’s been a publishing industry, self-publishing was disparaged as “vanity publishing”, because writers, unable or unwilling to risk rejection by a “real” publisher, did it only to see their book in print. But John T. Reed argues that today it’s those who seek a publisher that are the real “vanity publishers”, since all they want is to see their name on a book as the author. That those who want to make money selling books have to undertake the editing, printing, and distribution tasks themselves. And, John T. Reed warns, don’t use Amazon, which is the worst of both worlds! 

I found John T. Reed’s ideas so compelling that I’ve decided to try them out. More on that later. 

First, let’s finish unraveling the propaganda mechanisms upon which the business model of marketing to writers depends. For them to work, writers must be completely psychologically broken, convinced that we have to beg readers for attention and beg social media companies for access to the chance to beg those readers for attention. So broken that we forget the reason we started writing. So broken we forget how much, and how eagerly, people love to read. 

Capitalist propaganda would never try to sell writers on a pitch like: “learn how to research and write to provide use-value for others and earn a good living in the process!” Instead, it’s the promise of being one of the superstars and, importantly, of not being one of the rejected losers! 

(Probably worth mentioning that it isn’t just propaganda, but legal and monopoly mechanisms that the propaganda serves. Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin call it Chokepoint Capitalism.)

But in fact, the market for writing is a long-tailed one. Sure, there are the superstars. But you don’t need to be one of them to find your readers, even – gasp – readers who are able to pay for your writing. 

No matter how much they try to make you feel otherwise, there are three facts that endure: 1. Readers like to read 2.Despite all the hype about how people don’t read any more, you know people love reading and they do it all day. 3. It’s about you and readers and everything else is people coming in between trying to make some money off of both. The social media giants have made you feel like, in the attention economy, readers are doing you a favor by reading your stuff and above all, these platforming profiteers are doing you a favor by putting your stuff in front of readers. 

Not true. All readers want is to find out something they didn’t know before through a written conversation with another person. They don’t need stars or superstar authors, the precise 28 beats of storytelling to be followed, “plain english” excised of all Latin words, or Joseph Campbell Heroes Journeys for every character. 

Maybe everything becomes a superstar system in our world, including the substack over which I write you today (having left mailchimp because they lowered the size of their free tier mailing list to better focus on their paying customers – which didn’t include me). But let’s have the conversations we can have in the meantime. 

Don’t let them break your spirit, writers! We are all on here to write to each other, and we all love to read. Allow me to qualify my earlier words that only writers and readers matter and nuance it this way: Let use-value be your filter. Editors are here to help. Publishers do valuable work including assigning good editors and artists and making your writing into a nice book. 

[Sidebar: There are exceptions, including big ones. I have loved working with Monthly Review and with Fernwood as a writer – and it’s probably no coincidence that I love reading their books as a reader. Monthly Review and Fernwood are mission-driven publishers that serve their community of readers. You don’t work with them for vanity or for money, but for the mission. And the mission doesn’t have to be as exalted   – in my opinion – as MR or Fernwood’s: academic publishing generally is supposed to be mission-driven too.]

But you don’t need gatekeepers between you and readers and you definitely don’t need gatekeepers who make you feel bad about yourself. Your writing is an offering and I’m grateful for it. So, writers: thank you.

And whether you:

• make tactical use of a blogging platform like substack or wordpress;

• follow the advice of John T. Reed laying out, printing, and mailing your own books;

• or even find a publisher that shares your values and doesn’t treat you like a nuisance;

Stop letting the platform giants (and those who have internalized their propaganda) bully you!

And readers – if you’re interested – do consider buying my books. You see, I’ve started this whole self-publishing thing… and I’ll make a substack post announcing just that in a few days.