One of my least favorite popular genres of social-media writing is “This advice is evil.” The precise form varies a lot, because it appears in almost every walk of life, but there’s a broad pattern that’s common: take some common advice regarding a particular activity, explain that the common advice goes directly against what works for the author of the current piece, and then connect it to some greater societal ill. Then wrap it back around to connect the original advice directly to the societal ill. To give a deliberately silly example: cooking-show hosts recommend kosher salt, but that costs a bit more than ordinary table salt, therefore it’s an exclusionary practice, and thus nobody should cook with with kosher salt because it perpetuates inequality.
This is particularly annoying when it surfaces in reference to activities like writing, where you can almost always find directly contradictory sets of advice because everybody goes at it a little differently. The proximate cause of this post (which I’m not directly citing because I don’t want to make it a fight about any particular bit of this) was a one-two combo regarding writing advice. I opened one social media site, and found multiple reshares of a thing arguing that one commonly recommended practice is oppressive bullshit, with lots of people saying “Yeah! Stick it to them!” Then I opened a different site in another tab, and found the exact opposite advice being shared with equal enthusiasm for it as the only true way to write.
This is to some extent a part of a larger practice of trying to claim moral weight for aesthetic preferences, and I find it wearying. Very few people giving advice are actively doing so with ill intent; most of the time what they’re saying is really “This is what worked for me.” That doesn’t guarantee it will work for you, but they really don’t have anything else to offer.
The example I always give for this concerns teaching. When I started at Union 20 years ago, I had very little teaching experience, so I went around to the other faculty in the department and asked them for advice on classroom technique. One guy in particular spoke enthusiastically about what he referred to as “breaking the fourth wall,” saying that he made it a point to move away from the chalkboard and out into the classroom (our rooms at the time were set up with a big open space in the middle; see old photo below). He said this created a more welcoming and inclusive feeling to the class, and was great for getting the students to participate more.
I tried this for a while, but gave it up after a week or so, because it was a dismal failure for the simple reason that I am not him. Specifically, the guy who suggested that is smaller than average, while I am… not. I’m 6’6” (just shy of 2m, for non-Americans), and around 280lbs (127kg); I’m also, in the words of a past student evaluation comment “loud and intense.” When I moved away from the board and out into the classroom, it didn’t feel welcoming and inclusive, it felt terrifying because I loom over seated students in a way that my colleague does not.
So I learned my lesson, and stay back by the board unless I have a very specific need to come out into the middle of the room to do a demo. It’s maybe a little more formal, but on the other hand, I don’t have students cowering in fear. That doesn’t mean my colleague was giving me bad advice in any objective sense— it was just bad advice for me.
I feel like that’s the case with most of the advice that gets run through the “This advice is evil” algorithm. It’s really not bad as a general matter— it presumably worked out well for whoever is offering it— but it’s bad advice for a specific person receiving it. Somebody else might very well find it helpful, even essential.
(This is not to say that there isn’t actively bad advice out there—you can find any number of people in academic science promoting unhealthy and exploitative practices around working hours and personal time off and the like. Some things that used to be common are now borderline illegal, for good reasons.)
So, I really wish more people would make an effort to qualify their advice, and even more importantly to qualify their rejections of advice that didn’t work. It’s very rare for people to be offering advice that can’t work; most bad advice you will hear is good for the person offering it but bad for you. We need fewer absolute statements about what is and isn’t good practice.
Given that we’re in a world where different people regularly recommend directly contradictory things, though, how are you supposed to sort between them? Well, unfortunately, there’s nothing to offer but trial and error— if you know the people offering the advice well already, you can sort of calibrate based on how their style and personality compares to yours, but even that’s not a sure thing. Learning how to sort good-for-you advice from bad-for-you advice is just a part of becoming a professional… whatever you are, and of adulthood in general.
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