What are some others things that school teaches us about writing that aren’t useful when we write in the “real world”? I know this depends on the type of writing: different techniques are useful for writing blog posts than books.
I’ll start with another idea: it’s fine to steal good wording. Sometimes inserting a quote or rewording a sentence isn’t the best way to integrate an idea from another source into your writing, so you can just “steal” the wording that another writer uses and cite them.
In fiction, the rule of thumb is “first, you have to unlearn everything you learned at school”. But that’s mostly because most of what you write at school is not fiction, so different rules apply.
Specifically the “introduction, body, conclusion” pattern makes fiction boring. It makes sense when you teach things (introduction = what you should focus on; conclusion = reminder of the important points), but for some reason teachers insist to use it also for stories like “what did you do during summer holidays”, which is just wrong (assuming that the purpose of storytelling is to entertain the listeners, not make them memorize your holiday schedule).
In contrast, cool stories often start “in medias res”.
What are some others things that school teaches us about writing that aren’t useful when we write in the “real world”? I know this depends on the type of writing: different techniques are useful for writing blog posts than books.
I’ll start with another idea: it’s fine to steal good wording. Sometimes inserting a quote or rewording a sentence isn’t the best way to integrate an idea from another source into your writing, so you can just “steal” the wording that another writer uses and cite them.
In fiction, the rule of thumb is “first, you have to unlearn everything you learned at school”. But that’s mostly because most of what you write at school is not fiction, so different rules apply.
Specifically the “introduction, body, conclusion” pattern makes fiction boring. It makes sense when you teach things (introduction = what you should focus on; conclusion = reminder of the important points), but for some reason teachers insist to use it also for stories like “what did you do during summer holidays”, which is just wrong (assuming that the purpose of storytelling is to entertain the listeners, not make them memorize your holiday schedule).
In contrast, cool stories often start “in medias res”.