What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?

There's that quote about how "the most important thing is sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made." So there are two equal and opposite commandments for popular writing. First, you've got to sound like you're chatting with your reader, like you're giving them an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness access to your ideas as you think them. Second, on no account should you actually do that.

Eliezer is one of the masters at this; his essays are littered with phrases like "y'know" and "pretty much", but they're way too tight to be hastily published first drafts (or maybe I'm wrong and Eliezer is one of the few people in the world who can do this; chances are you're not). You've got to put a lot of work into making something look that spontaneous. I'm a fan of words like "sorta" and "kinda" myself, but I have literally gone through paragraphs and replaced all of the "to some degrees" with "sortas" to get the tone how I wanted it.

I like inserting myself and my thought processes into things I write. It's a no-no in serious writing, but in informal writing it can emphasize the informality and become endearing, a sort of "we can take off the masks now, because we're all friends here". This only works if your personal asides are actually endearing to people, or at least not actively boring and off-putting, but if you get it right it lets you keep more spontaneity, since talking in first person is a natural impulse. As in everything, "first learn the rules and the reasons for them, then break them as much as you want".

The real meat of writing comes from an intuitive flow of words and ideas that surprises even yourself. Editing can only enhance and purify writing so far; it needs to have some natural potential to begin with. My own process here is to mentally rehearse an idea very many times without even thinking about writing. Once I'm an expert at explaining it to myself or an imaginary partner, then I transcribe the explanation I settle upon (some people say they don't think in words; I predict writing will not come naturally to these people). Then I edit the heck out of it.

The best way to improve the natural flow of ideas, and your writing in general, is to read really good writers so much that you unconsciously pick up their turns of phrase and don't even realize when you're using them. The best time to do that is when you're eight years old; the second best time is now.

Your role models here should be those vampires who hunt down the talented, suck out their souls, and absorb their powers. Which writers' souls you feast upon depends on your own natural style and your goals. I've gained most from reading Eliezer, Mencius Moldbug, Aleister Crowley, and G.K. Chesterton (links go to writing samples from each I consider particularly good); I'm currently making my way through Chesterton's collected works pretty much with the sole aim of imprinting his writing style into my brain.

Stepping from the sublime to the ridiculous, I took a lot from reading Dave Barry when I was a child. He has a very observational sense of humor, the sort where instead of going out looking for jokes, he just writes about a topic and it ends up funny. It's not hard to copy if you're familiar enough with it. And if you can be funny, people will read you whether you have any other redeeming qualities or not.

Getting imprinted with good writers like this will serve you for your entire life. It will serve you whether you're on your fiftieth draft of a thesis paper, or you're rushing a Less Wrong comment in the three minutes before you have to go to work. It will even serve you in regular old non-written conversation, because wit and clarity are independent of medium.

And it will also inform and limit your use of all the other rules above. Luke's fourth point - telling stories about characters taking actions - is a good one, but he very reasonably didn't start this post off with a story about some student working on a term paper. There have been a few LW posts that kind of seemed kludgy and artificial in adding characters and stories, and others that did it really well. Probably some very smart person could figure out why it succeeds somewhere and fails somewhere else, but it's easier to just cultivate the virtue that is nameless.

Some people say to write down everything and only edit later. I take the opposite tack. I used to believe that I rarely edited at all because I usually publish something as soon as it's done. Then a friend watching me write said that she was getting seasick from my tendency to go back and forth deleting and rewriting the same sentence fragment or paragraph before moving on. Most likely the best writers combine both editing methods.