Dearest Malcolm, Each writer finds his/her own way. Each writer makes up his/her own rules. Try reading, as you quote him, George Orwell's 'Burma Days' and you will find the POV varies, and quite often, from character to character, and equally as often, he uses 'information dump'.

However, it is still a good book. So, if 'blame' is the word, who do I 'blame'? Nobody, because it is a good and well written book.

As regards the comment about the 'slush pile', well it is true I don't have a book published as yet, although one, and I must say thanks to YWO, is now on an editor's desk, (so past the slush pile), and I do have hopes for it.

I have also written, sold, had produced and broadcast 8 plays for BBC TV.

So, in the context of YWO I don't feel I need to make excuses.

And I am conscious of the fact that some of us have had books published, and, after all the congratulations and back slapping, sales have been somewhere between poor and invisible, and I understand that could just as well happen to me.

Your writing ability, Malcolm, is ill served by your desire to make things 'personal'.

Yeah!! Punk publishing!

Read Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and you'll find him advising active voice instead of passive, short words instead of long ones. He also advises cutting any word that isn't absolutely necessary. Are these not the same "rules" you're railing against?

Go ahead and make your own rules. Reinvent the wheel, if you want to.

This is why reviewing others is such an enlightening activity, because when they're other people's adverbs and other people's passive voice, it's easier to see that they are a bad idea. I find when I'm editing someone's work, I tend to cut most of the adverbs, not BECAUSE they're adverbs, but because they're unnecessary words mucking up the flow of the writing. I don't set out to eliminate adverbs and adjectives, but they tend to be the superfluous words--not as essential as nouns and verbs.

I'm willing to concede that there are many beginners on this site who cling to the only "rules" they know. Having said that, there's a difference between a reviewer who says, "You're not supposed to use so many adverbs" (applying the rule in a general way) and a reviewer who says, "Your adverbs are weighing down your sentences" (meaning your writing, in this piece, specifically, suffers from superfluous words.) The latter may appear to be applying the "rules," but they are probably right.

I haven't attended a creative writing program. Have you? On what do you base your assumption that people who have graduated from such programs are rigidly applying these beginners' "rules" to everything they read? Don't you think it's more likely that they define "good writing" as anything that holds their attention? It seems to me that whenever I read agents on the subject of common mistakes, they're not saying, "Don't break the rules because the rules are inviolable." They're saying certain mistakes make for a bad reading experience, and a lot of those mistakes happen to be violations of the "rules."

What I'm trying to say is that the "rules" have evolved out of the practical experience and the accumulated wisdom of the writers who have gone before us. They're not as rigid as some beginners believe they are, but they're not entirely arbitrary, either.

PaulE has put it very well--the "rules" are merely guidelines--and Joe90 is right that you have to know what the rules are before you can break them (I had an English teacher who taught us the same thing.) Learning the "rules" of writing is like learning the rules of grammar. Of course you can break them, and to great effect, but a sophisticated reader can tell the difference between when you've broken the rules on purpose and when you've broken the rules because you just don't know any better. The difference is: one works and the other doesn't. No stars. No charts. Just crits.

I am unfamiliar with any of the rules being referred to on this thread. I made up my own rules. I'm normally not big on rules of any kind, anywhere. Most are unnecessary or fail to apply in all the situations to which they are mindlessly applied. So I only have a few, which seems like plenty, because it's the execution that's a bitch:

1)I'm writing to communicate ideas to the reader
2) A person trying to communicate has to take responsibility to make the communication meaningful to the person(s) addressed
3) If what I've written doesn't accomplish that goal, I have to change it until it does, because no one will read something which does not mean anything to them.

I think Jane Austen follows all my rules, and that's why people still read her books.