Advice and Dissent from James W. Ziskin

Tell us, the best edit or manuscript advice you received, and the worst?  

I have a tradition of posting my New Year’s resolutions poem every January. You’ll find it below, following my answer (rant) to this week’s question. Happy New Year!

For this week’s question, I’m going to limit myself to my least favorite bit of writing advice and make some enemies in the process. I strongly disagree with the conventional wisdom that it’s “bad” style to use any dialogue tag other than “said.”

Such advice rem...