BAD ADVERB NO COOKIE - There's a piece of advice people are fond of pulling out and waving around: "don't use adverbs." Simplistic and, as far as I'm concerned, supremely unhelpful. In my experience, when people say “don’t use adverbs” what they usually mean is “don’t use -ly adverbs.” And then when you substitute an adverbial phrase they proclaim it suddenly much better. And as I realized this in the course of my writing, anyway, (and everyone’s experience varies) I decided that what people meant to say and weren’t conveying at all well was that describing events in terms of Actor, Action, Manner of Action wasn’t always the best approach when trying to convey a mood, an atmosphere, or whatever. You can say “he ran quickly” or “she said loudly” but it’s sometimes more useful to the story to say “he crossed the field in the time it took her to aim” or “she pitched her voice to carry across the parade grounds.” And sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes brevity works.

But boiling all that down to “don’t use adverbs” isn’t fucking helpful in the slightest.

SHOW DON'T TELL - The problem with these bits of advice is that they are useful. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but it's also to an extent true. Generally speaking, presenting a reader with a setting and a handful of characters and showing these characters moving through problems to achieve a resolution and a goal is much more engaging than telling them what happened. And yet, when you get too caught up in showing off everything that you've created, your story can meander, it can become too bloated and collapse of its own weight, potential readers might be put off by wordiness or sheer size of volume, or you yourself can lose track of all the moving pieces. Sometimes, telling things is useful. Off the top of my head, if you have a piece of ancient history that becomes relevant in the present, you can take a paragraph just to tell what happened without going into the vivid details. If a person is taking a series of actions to get between one point and another but the transition itself isn't important to the story, by all means, just tell the readers that by one way or another, three years passed. A great tongue-in-cheek example of this shows up in the book version of the Princess Bride, where William Goldman claims to cut out Morgenstern's excessively florid and detailed prose and just tells the reader that Morgenstern described these things, and they might be important because this or that. There is, of course, no Morgenstern version; the whole thing is an affectation. And a pretty funny one at that.

There's a place to show the reader what's going on and there's a place to tell the reader that these things happened in order to set up the rest of the story. Learning the difference can be tricky, but as with everything else, practice and reviewing or editing will help.

PASSIVE VOICE - The passive voice is a grammatical construction whereby the noun that would be the object of the sentence becomes the subject, and the verb in the original sentence becomes a verbal noun, both of these linked by a copula. Without all the grammar speak, the passive voice is what changes a sentence from "Captain shot him." to "He was shot by the captain." And, generally, the passive voice is seen as weaker and a poor choice for phrasing when you're writing fiction. Certainly it's less vivid than the alternative, and a lot of my own changes to my writing have been to move a sentence from passive voice to active.

That said, there's nothing inherently superior about active voice. They're different constructions meant to convey different things. In passive voice, the focus is on the object of the action, and if that's where the focus of the scene should be, then that's what you should use. You might want to pay more attention to your sentence construction to create the right impact, but the focus will be where it needs to be. Alternatively, if the goal is to create a detached or muted atmosphere, the passive voice might still be what you want. Passive voice is recommended in academic publications precisely because it conveys that impression of detachment, which a researcher is supposed to be, detached from the object of research. And, again, the object of research is the focus. So, if you want to put the focus on the thing being acted upon, if you want to create a detached mood, if you're describing something removed from the immediacy of the scene in time or place or what have you, passive voice might be very helpful to you! If you want your reader to be right there in the moment, to be pushed or moved by the story, if you want your words to be vivid and have punch, the active voice might be what's called for at that time. The tool needed for the job depends on the job itself.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW - This one is often skewered. If we only ever wrote what we know, our books would be a lot less interesting. As a starting point, write what you know is actually pretty good advice; it takes a lot of uncertainty out of the process of writing and lets you focus on improving other aspects, such as technique or work discipline. Eventually, you can go farther afield, but in the beginning if you find there's a lot of things you want or need to work on, writing what's familiar to you might help. If nothing else there'd be less research. The flip side to this bit of advice, of course, is that you can't exactly write what you don't know. But then, that's what research is for.

Essentially what people tend to be saying when they say 'write what you know' is, stick to what you're good at or familiar with. And if that's where your comfort zone is, by all means, there's nothing wrong with that. But don't feel constrained by it, either. Even if you don't think you're good at this or that unfamiliar field, you'll never get better if you don't practice, and it's hard to know whether or not you'd enjoy it if you don't try.

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Dialect and Language
Applying Writing Advice
Tenses and Person

Outlines
Research
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Personal Style
Tell the Story