One of the things that irritates me most about newspapers and blogs is the seemingly endless stream of articles claiming the provide “rules” for good writing. At least the teachers who forced grammatical rules upon me at school had some semblance of consistency, even if it was only that we were not supposed to do something that you would not do in Latin. These days the rule-makers just make it up as they go along.

Take, for example, Juliet Gardiner in The Guardian, who sets out to tell us what we should and should not do when writing non-fiction. Some of her rules are simple and direct, for example:

And if you ever start a sentence with “meanwhile”, you have literally lost the plot.

Really? What it is about that word that caused it to be singled out for such explicit treatment? And how can one “literally” lose the plot if one is writing something that isn’t fiction and therefore doesn’t have a plot as such? Not that I start sentences with “meanwhile” very often, and I’d probably do so more often in fiction that in non-fiction. Just like every other word, however, it has its place. I see no reason to subject it to a blanket ban, let alone to start pointing the finger of doom at someone for using it.

Now you might think that this is a silly and trivial thing to get annoyed about, and you would be right. But later on in the article Ms. Gardiner starts a paragraph with this sentence:

But at least non-fiction writers are not usually advised to “wear their research lightly”, though all should try to, as should rather more novelists.

This, remember, is someone who purports to be telling us how to know good writing from bad. Is it really necessary to write like that while doing so?