There is a moment in every new columnist's life when the piece is going well, the argument is landing, and then the cultural example arrives — and it is the wrong one. Not necessarily factually wrong. Wrong as in it can be knocked over by a single comment below the line, and the whole column goes down with it.

Cultural criticism is harder than political or economic writing in one specific way: everyone has a stake. Your reader has seen the film, heard the album, been to the gallery, grown up in the town you are describing. They arrive with their own evidence and their own memories. The tricks that pass elsewhere in opinion writing — the exaggerated opponent, the both-sides shrug, the raised eyebrow — get caught here faster than anywhere else.

None of this is a licence to be dull. Strong opinions belong in cultural writing. But the argument has to hold when someone leans on it.

The straw man is the laziest trick in the drawer

You can spot it from the first clause. "We are apparently meant to believe that…" Who is this we? Who says it? If nobody says it, you are arguing with a mood you invented for the occasion.

Before you write "critics claim" or "the fashionable view is", try to name an actual critic and an actual piece. If you cannot, change the sentence. Something like: "Much of the praise for this series rests on the idea that slow pacing is honesty. I don't think that holds." Same point. Honest footing. Much harder to dismiss.

Three signs you have built one

• Your opponent's position is impossible to defend — nobody is out there arguing that all art should be bland and corporate.
• You have used "in other words" to translate a reasonable view into a worse one.
• You are paraphrasing rather than quoting.

False equivalence is not the same as fairness

"Some will say this novel is a masterpiece; others find it overrated. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in between." That is not a position. It is a shrug dressed as wisdom, and readers can smell it.

Real fairness is narrower and harder: weigh specific claims. If the objection is that the third act collapses, deal with the third act. If the complaint is that the dialogue is mannered, quote a line and test it. Nobody is owed a paragraph of reassurance.

The mirror-image mistake is inventing symmetry for effect. Comparing a band's first gig in a room above a pub to a stadium tour is not a comparison, it is a scale error. Say what is actually being compared, and why the comparison is fair. If it isn't, drop it.

Sneering feels like winning and reads like losing

Consider: "One has to wonder what sort of person queues for this." That sentence is not aimed at the work. It is aimed at the audience, and it lands on your own page as contempt. The temptation is obvious — contempt is easy to write and gives an instant hit of authority. It also tells the reader that you would sneer at them if they disagreed with you about anything else.

You can be scathing about an idea and generous about the people who hold it. Those two things are not in tension; the second is what makes the first persuasive. A useful test: read your sharpest line aloud and imagine saying it to the person you are describing, in a room, sober. If that image is unbearable, rewrite the line, not the person.

Confusing your taste with a moral position

Disliking something is not evidence that it harms anyone. "It's boring" is a perfectly respectable criticism, and it is much stronger when said plainly rather than dressed up as ethics. Beware the sentence that begins with a complaint about craft and ends with a verdict on civilisation.

The reverse error is just as common: assuming that liking something unpopular makes you brave. It doesn't. Nor does disliking something popular make you discerning.

Context does a lot of work here. A genre's conventions are not flaws in themselves. Criticising a romantic comedy for being predictable is a bit like criticising a sonnet for having fourteen lines. The interesting question is whether the convention is used well, or used as a substitute for thought.

Details, and how to handle getting them wrong

Names, dates, who wrote the thing, which decade it came out in. Small errors do outsized damage: they give readers permission to dismiss the argument along with the slip. If you are unsure of a credit, write around it or leave it out. Never quote from memory — find the line.

And if you do get something wrong, correct it in the next column briskly, in a sentence or two, and move on. A long apology reads as an attempt to make the correction more interesting than it is.

Seven checks before you file

1. Can I name the person, outlet or view I am arguing against?
2. Have I engaged the strongest version of it, rather than the silliest?
3. Is my tone aimed at the argument or at the audience?
4. Have I called something harmful when I actually mean it is dull?
5. Would the same sentence survive if I swapped in something I like?
6. Are the facts checked: credits, dates, titles, quotes?
7. Does the piece say something, or does it just enjoy its own disdain?

Sticking the ending without a lecture

Most first drafts end with a paragraph about what this says about us all. Cut it. Verdicts on the state of the culture are the easiest way to lose a reader who has followed you for nine hundred words.

Better closing moves, in no particular order: return to the concrete detail from your opening and say what it now shows; state plainly what you want the reader to notice the next time they encounter the thing; or finish on the image that made you want to write the column in the first place, and let it do the work.

One last thing, about the comments. You do not have to answer every one, and you certainly should not answer the worst. But if the sharpest reply under the line is a fair hit, say so, publicly, in a sentence. A columnist who can be corrected without retreating into wounded dignity is a columnist people keep reading — which, in the end, is the only way any argument of yours gets to be heard at all.

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