Summary

Inspired in part by the return of an age-old discussion about how bad Judith Butler's writing is (answer: it's pretty bad!) I've been thinking about advice on how to write well. I've argued before that a large proportion of such advice is useless, or self-contradictory, or regularly ignored by the person dispensing it. (\"Omit needless words,\" declares William Strunk, in The Elements of Style. Well, yes, but if you already know a word is needless, you shouldn't need to be told to omit it, and if you don't know it's needless, how is Strunk's advice going to help?) Still, three pieces of advice have made a concrete difference to my own productivity as a writer – and I think also to the quality of my writing, though that's not for me to say. Here they are, in case they might help you too: Good writing is pointing out. As Steven Pinker notes in his book The Sense of Style, writing is cognitively unnatural: it's such a new way of communicating, on the timescale of human evolution, that it's little wonder we struggle. ...