When Taught to Write, Are We Taught to Write Badly?

I was thinking recently about all the things not to do that I've been taught in the Creative Writing segment of my university course, and how many of those things I was told to do back in primary school (I can only talk of the primary education system in England as it's the one I grew up on). I noticed that quite a few things I was told when I was just starting out writing I now see as bad habits I need to get out of. Some examples of these include...

Don't write 'said' all the time; use more interesting words like 'cried', 'exclaimed', etc.
Yeah. Don't do that. 'Said' is one of those words that the brain doesn't really process; we're used to reading it, and we don't really take it in, it's just there. 'Hello,' Terry said. If every line of dialogue is followed by a more colourful word, suddenly the reader's eye is drawn to it, and that can be problematic in three ways: 1) it draws attention away from the dialogue and the action, 2) it makes you look very self-conscious as a writer, as if you were sitting at your desk fretting about writing 'said' too many times and you're compensating, and 3) if you use too many, or too outlandish synonyms for 'said', the reader will find it tiresome and ridiculous. Luckily I got out of this habit fairly quickly, and although I do use alternatives to 'said' I never feel like I have to just so I won't write 'said' too many times. Long story short: 'For god's sake, just write "said"!' Terry vociferated.


Describe your character's appearance in detail
Okay, so I wasn't told to do this directly, but whenever I did describe a character in great detail, I was told it was very good, so I got it in my head that I should always do that. Now I know better. Lengthy descriptions of how a character looks have a very Mary Sue-ish, children's-books-for-girls-ish, Twilight-ish feel to it, so I tend to keep it far, far away from my writing. Of course, you can reveal a lot about a character by how they dress, how they wear their hair, how clean they are, etc. and I even find that you can tell a lot about the narrator by what they focus on and how they describe someone, but there is a limit. There's no real reason to describe every minute detail, unless the narrator is really, really interested in that cluster of freckles just under her left nostril, or those freckles are an important plot point later on or something.

Use lots of adverbs; it livens up your writing.
No no no no no no no. This has been covered in all four books about writing that I own: avoid adverbs unless they are absolutely necessary. Seriously, they can't get enough of bad-mouthing adverbs. But back in school, I was encouraged to use as many as possible to make my writing 'more interesting' or some such. This is probably one of my biggest problems in writing now; the last portfolio I handed in, my tutor told me to go through the entire thing and delete every single adverb that wasn't crucial, and my god there were so many. I even know that I'm supposed to use them sparingly, but I do it without even realising it. In fact, if you have time, and want to laugh at my bad habits, use the CTRL+F search function and search for 'ly' and see how many adverbs I used in this very post. I'm sure the result will make me ashamed.


But, I shouldn't be too hasty to write off what I learned in primary school, as I did learn a few things that are still useful today. Such things include...

Don't use the word 'nice'.
I think 'nice' is one of my least favourite words. Probably my second least favourite word after 'annoying', and I hate both words for the same reason, so I'll stick to 'nice'. It's just so nondescript. It's plain, it's boring, it has low lexical density, it's a bad word. Like 'very', it's just not something you want in your writing because it doesn't really add anything. The only time such words would be acceptable is in dialogue, as is the case with most literary rules I've come across.

End sections on a cliffhanger.
Speaks for itself really. If a chapter ends on a cliffhanger, the reader will have to keep reading to see how it resolves itself. Granted, I would often write a cliffhanger with no idea of how it would resolve itself, but it's good advice nonetheless.

Use other works as inspiration
Another self-explanatory one, but I'll go into some detail here. The first things I ever wrote were based on this kind of stimulus: read this book, and write your own version. They were short picture books, so it was never particularly time-consuming, and it was a fun, relatively easy way to get started in writing; all you need to do is change a few things: the setting, the characters' names, the little fiddly details, and you have your own work. Now, obviously I don't encourage plagiarism, which this really borders on, but I do encourage looking at works you like and building your own work around a certain theme, idea, character, plot element or overall tone of that work. It was essentially what got me started in writing, before I even knew that was what I wanted to do, so I do recommend it.


So we have a balanced argument, I'd say. Do the beneficial things I learned outweigh the more ill-advised things I was taught as a child? I would say yes. Those bad habits will be a pain to get out of, but I'm still grateful for the leg-up I was given back then. If I wasn't taught any of that, I'm certain my writing would have suffered in at least some small way, and I probably would have been set back quite a bit, having to learn the importance of lexical density instead of it being near second nature, and torturing myself trying to come up with my own completely original idea, because using someone else's work as inspiration is cheating!

So, to answer the question posed in the title of this post, I would say no, we are not taught badly. We are taught well, we were just taught some unfortunate bad habits along the way.