Whew. There's so much I disagree with here. Where to start?

All of these "Lessons from the Greats" have been floating around for a few generations at this point, and they are utter garbage as general writing advice. Twain, Hemingway, Strunk & White all ignore this advice in their own writing. And they do it for very good reasons: it makes for shitty, boring writing with zero personality.

Some domains of writing require this, of course. It's not bad advice for Garner to preach these things in his Legal Writing and Editing books and courses because in legal contexts (briefs, contracts, laws) you don't want interesting writing. You want the clearest, most unambiguous writing possible. Same goes for pure journalism. The writer's voice should be absent and the facts put on display as simply as possible. Academic papers and textbooks should also follow this advice.

But writing a blog post you want other people to read is exactly the place where all of that goes out the window. If the author of this post had spend more than 12 minutes researching good writing advice, he might have noticed the hundreds of writing experts who rail against this kind of guidance all the time. He might also have noticed that every single one of these things like active voice, avoiding adverbs, etc. goes against the only two pieces of good advice he wrote: write what you want to read and write in your own voice.

These specific prohibitions are in the same class of shit advice that shit writing teachers give to shit writing students to get a not-shit grade in a shit writing class. Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction. And don't end a sentence with a preposition. And don't use passive voice. (Most of the people who still troll with this kind critique can't even identify passive voice in non-trivial constructions.) Don't split infinitives. And don't use big words. And on. And on. And on.

Of course people can overuse these patterns. Many people do. Maybe I just did. But telling people to avoid them in general because they can be overused is absurd. It's also lazy. It's a lot easier to tell someone to write according to a safe formula than it is to sit down and analyze why something feels overused and help the writer understand what can be better about it.

Quality writing for a blog post needs personality. Minding these "Lessons" removes that.

Here's my advice for writing a quality blog post in 1 hour:

1. Don't. It doesn't work.
2. Don't assume you're an expert on a topic simply because you started a business related to it. You probably aren't.
3. Don't assume that 12 minutes of research makes you an expert on anything.
4. Don't refer to yourself as a founder or talk about how founders do things differently than other people do. Founders aren't special.
5. Don't be afraid to write above 8th grade reading comprehension.

6. Do write things you want to read.
7. Do write in your own voice.
8. Do use adverbs, colorful phrases, made up words, and flavoring elements that put your unique voice and personality into your written text.
9. Do give me a reason to read your blog post on a topic (Trust me, there are thousands of others. You're not the first.) instead of some other blog, a Wikipedia article, an academic journal article, or some other source of information.
10. Do be kind to yourself when you're writing; be an asshole when editing.