Your English teachers lied to you.
Listen. I respect the hell out of teachers. The vast majority of them work crazy hard and have a greater impact on children than some parents. And most of the time, including the times they give you well-meaning âwriting rules,â they only want to instill good and helpful habits into you.
That doesnât change the fact that many of these rules are stupid.Â
Here are my top five âwriting ruleâ pet peeves, and five rules that should be followed.
â Donât write âsaid.â
Okay, I know this is common knowledge by now, but itâs so important. The concept that you can never write â so-and-so saidâ is hurting novice writersâ narratives. Said is invisible. Said is powerful. Said is transformable. If every quote ends in a strong synonym, it is distracting. Sometimes, in an established repartee, quotes donât need to be tagged at all. Or an adverb following âsaidâ might be better for the narrative than any single verb.
Eg. //Â âI hate the rain,â grumbled David.
âI love it,â Claire announced.
âYou love everything,â he muttered.
âIncluding you!â she giggled.
âI hate the rain,â grumbled David.
âI love it,â said Claire.
âYou love everything,â he said impatiently.
âIncluding you!â
â Donât write âsomething.â
Cold hard truth, baby. âSomethingâ is a draft word. Itâs what you write when you want to think of a replacement. I cringe when I see it in a sentence that would have been improved tenfold by a specific noun or descriptive phrase in its place. There are times when âsomethingâ works or is the only option, but experiment by replacing that word with more description before deciding itâs necessary to keep.
Eg. // He pulled something shiny from his pocket. She craned her neck to see what it was. A metal flask. versus. A flash of light caught the metal he pulled from his pocket. She craned her neck to see what it was. A drinking flask.