The worst writing advice of the day comes from the documentation for a very useful writing tool called Zettlr. In explaining how Markdown deals with linebreaks, the manual tells us:

“Markdown will, by default, remove single line breaks and treat double linebreaks as paragraph breaks.… Some people make use of this behaviour for their own writing process: They write one sentence per line so that they have an easier time trimming all sentences to approximately the same length.”

Dr. Boli does not know where the idea that all your sentences should be approximately the same length came from, but it is a bad idea. It did not occur to him until today that anyone needed to be told it was a bad idea. The only reason for writing sentences that way would be to lull your readers to sleep so that you can slip some binding legal agreements past them that no one would accept in a waking state. By searching Google for “make all sentences approximately the same length,” we discover the consoling fact that not even teachers of creative writing consider that a good idea. Yes: we have found a piece of writing advice so bad that even creative-writing teachers repudiate it.

The mechanical technique our programmer mentions could, however, be very useful, but for the opposite reason. Write one sentence per line. Now look at your lines. If they are all roughly the same length, you have some rewriting to do.

In fact, if you use this technique, what you will have will be something that looks like a poem by Whitman. Walt Whitman was a master of rhythm. He toiled incessantly over his poems, publishing his “Song of Myself” in constantly evolving versions from 1855 to 1891. It took him 36 years even to come up with the title.

Now, look at “Song of Myself” and examine the line lengths. Then try to write like that. You can’t, but it helps to have a model that exceeds your grasp.

Our faithful reader and frequent correspondent “KevinT” asks, in reference to our article about the word socialism,

What caused Dr. Boli to ignore the fuel tax that pays at least in some small part for highways? Dare I suggest “ignorance”?

This is a very reasonable question. What caused Dr. Boli not to insert a long digression about how the taxes that fund our roads are calculated was not wishing to divert the discussion into one of the endless debates about whether this or that use of government is “socialism.” Once again, in Dr. Boli’s opinion, the mere existence of those endless debates is proof enough that the word socialism is useless. Instead, we can simply say what we mean. Is it good to pay for highways this way? Should more highways be toll roads, so that the cost is more directly visible to the user? Should mass transit be a higher priority so that the poor have a better chance of getting to work if they cannot afford a reliable car? Or, on the other hand, should all highways as well as transit authorities be privatized, so that the free market rather than politics can decide where the money should be spent? These are questions we can debate in clear terms without resorting to name-calling, and the healthy disagreement would sharpen our minds and sanitize our politics.

But KevinT asks specifically about fuel taxes. So let us imagine a hypothetical parallel. Suppose that tomorrow your government took over all the grocery stores and started giving the food away free.

“But that’s socialism!” cries that man in the checked suit.

No, it is not, reply the populist politicians who rammed this new program through the legislature. It is perfectly analogous to what we do with our highways, because we have instituted a new tax that is calculated according to the body weight of the citizen, and this tax will be used to pay for the free public groceries. So you see that the people who use groceries most are the ones who will pay the most. It is true that fat poor people will find themselves at a disadvantage; but that is also exactly analogous to the way we fund our highways, where the rich who can afford the latest fuel-efficient hybrid pay much less in tax than the poor who are trying to make a twenty-year-old Grand Marquis limp along for another year.

Now, should we debate whether our hypothetical free-groceries-for-everyone program is socialism? Or would it not be more productive to confine our debate to whether it is a good idea?

The word of the day, dear friends, is socialism, and take a good long look at it, because after today you will not be allowed to use it anymore.

Now, if Dr. Boli actually had that authority, much more than our vocabulary would be improved. But he confines himself to what is in his power. If you wish to have a serious discussion with Dr. Boli about current politics, you will not use the word socialism. What you do on your own time is your own business.

Why has socialism been added to our ever-growing list of prohibited words? For the same reason as every other word that ends up there: it has lost all meaning. Ideally, the purpose of speech or writing is to convey thoughts. However, our sagacious readers are well aware that the true purpose of much speech and more writing is to avoid conveying thoughts: to seem to be saying something thoughtful while not having to think at all. Dr. Boli is not inclined to waste his time on such discourse, and his Index is a handy way to spot the blitherings that will not be worth his time. If they contain a word known to be a substitute for thinking, he stops paying attention.

Socialism has become one of those words. It is possible that it meant something at some time, although even socialists themselves could hardly agree on what that meaning was. It is also possible that it has a coherent meaning outside the United States, but we are not concerned with the rest of the world at the moment. Dr. Boli's readers in other countries are invited to continue feeling smugly superior.

In American politics today, the word socialism is simply a playground insult. It is a grown-up's way of saying, “I don't have to listen to you because you're a poopyhead.” An American—even an American who gets paid for supposedly insightful political commentary—can just haul out the word socialism and say, “That's it. Conversation over. I don't deal with poopyheads.”

The simple fact is that almost every single American has political beliefs that fall somewhere on the spectrum between government control of everything and government control of nothing. There are some who believe in complete anarchy, but they are not a significant part of the population. There are some who believe in complete communism, but they are not significant either. There is no sharp line between “capitalism” (which may also appear on the Index soon) and “socialism.” There are only disagreements about whether it is a good thing for the government to be involved in this or that.

Try this experiment. Ask a group of random Americans (a surprising number of Americans are random, so you should have no trouble finding test subjects) to tell you which is more “socialist”: highways or mass transit? Dr. Boli would be willing to bet quite a lot of money, up to 75¢ when he is feeling especially flush, that the majority will answer “mass transit.” Now consider these numbers: In 2019, American governments—federal, state, and local—spent about 203 billion dollars on highways and about 79 billion dollars on public transit. Most public-transit systems charge fares to recoup some of their expenses; the great majority of highways are supported by taxes alone. Which looks more socialist to you? And if you are about to argue with Dr. Boli (he knows who you are, the one over there in the checked suit) that mass transit is more socialist for some reason he has not understood, you are merely proving the more important point that the word socialism does not convey any coherent meaning we can rely on to make informed debate possible.

One of the curious phenomena of the last few years in American politics has been the rise of small numbers of politicians who are willing to call themselves socialists. But even in their mouths the word hardly has any coherent meaning. When we ask what they mean by socialism, they usually tell us that they are in favor of things like a national health-care system. In other words, their “socialism” is what the left-wing and right-wing parties in every other civilized country would agree on as fundamental political sanity. Otherwise, like every politician, they are in favor of good things and opposed to bad things. But the fact that socialism is now a permitted word in American political debate, that it is not automatically renounced by everyone on every side, may cause the word to become meaningful again at some point in the future. If that happens, Dr. Boli will be delighted to remove it from the Index.