Please disregard the following advice.

Today, instead of our usual departmental seminar, we M.A. students had a group meeting with Bristol's Writer in Residence, who had agreed to come in to give us some tips on writing essays. I will admit my snobbishness up front: I have a firm set of ideas about essay-writing that have been working quite well for me, and I was skeptical about how useful the session was going to be.

Unfortunately, not-helpful doesn't even begin to describe the advice we got. A few of the major points Bristol University is paying this man to teach its students:

1. Don't use the passive "tense". (This is being picky -- but if the university expert on writing can't get it right, where are we?)
2. What's the best way make your writing compelling? Use more polemic. If you don't really have much ground to stand on, just be really aggressive and offensive and at least you will shock your reader. (I'm quite sure this is the only time I've ever heard the word polemic used in a positive sense.)
3. The key to writing a successful conclusion: introduce new problems. E.g., "As I have shown, Augustus was the greatest emperor in Roman history. But...what about Constantine??? The End." This is an important tip because, "if you just state your thesis and then make your argument, well, that's a little boring, isn't it?"
4. "As someone famous, whose name I forget, once said, 'Kill your babies.'" (Again, maybe a little picky: but "Kill your darlings" is one of my favorite writing mantras, and I think it's fair to expect a novelist to get it right. His version just sounds like Swift without the irony. Watching a roomful of people copy it down made me want to eat my pencil.)

I'll quit ranting now because it makes me feel like a jerk. But, I care a lot about good writing, and, seriously: it's bad enough when people are allowed to graduate from college not knowing how to express themselves in print, but when this is the sort of thing we get from the professionals hired to solve the problem, we're really in a state.