Show Don’t Tell Isn’t the Fantastic Advice You Think

Let’s reevaluate narrative techniques and their impact on writing

Esme Harlow
The Writing Cooperative
8 min readMay 8, 2024

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Image: Author

The most common piece of writing advice, after ‘just write’, is ‘show, don’t tell’, a snappy little saying that’s more memorable than useful.

‘Show, don’t tell’ is a bat writers use to bludgeon other writers into tangled descriptions, poor…

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