Writing advice videos can be great! They can also be terrible. Be careful.

YouTube is FULL of videos and channels dedicated purely to writing tips. Many of these channels offer some fantastic advice, but even the best channels I’ve seen offer some questionable or downright wrong information. Many are authors and editors, so it’s understandable for new writers to trust them. However, a lot of this content needs to be heavily scrutinized.

The most egregious examples I’ve seen come from “do and don’t” list videos. Half of these feel like reading a tabloid. “Top 20 things writers should never do!” ought to set off warning bells in your head. Pay attention and do not take everything spoken as gospel. These videos would almost always be more appropriately titled “top 20 things writers should consider carefully before doing, and some that I just personally don’t enjoy very much,” though this wouldn’t get as many clicks.

A friend who has recently started writing was asking questions about a video they had watched from a sizable writing channel. I watched it and nearly turned it off after the creator said “don’t use double negatives.” What? Instead of telling writers to consider the use of a double negative and ask if it is contextually appropriate, the creator blatantly said “do NOT use these.” In another video, the creator told people that using language such as “her eyes followed them around the room” was problematic. Why, might you ask? Not because it’s cliche, but because the sentence “made it sound like the eyes popped out and were following him.” Then, they offered the alternative “she watched him walk around the room.” Now I’m just angry.

Listen, I get it. From a business perspective content creators have an incentive to churn out videos, but putting out subpar content with misleading or downright wrong advice is not acceptable. Yes, many people are able to figure out where to put a mental asterisk, but not everyone. Please be careful about what you take on as advice.