Five ingredients of a good advice column

Back in the seventeenth century the Mercury’s founding editor John Dunton thought a successful column needed a variety of “voices” to make it work and he hired a team of experts to field the readers’ questions including a mathematician, a philosopher, a “man of religion” and several “fictional” voices.

Today’s advice columnists tend to be lone voices but there are some key things that separate the good from the bad.

Here’s the top five things a good advice column should do:

1. Actually answer your question: Cary Tennis of Salon.com, an online magazine from the United States, is a celebrated advice columnist whose journey to the job makes an interesting story in its own right. But his approach can take some getting used to. I’d only read one column before feeling ready to dismiss him forever because of his tendency to ramble and raise more questions than he answers. In this reply to a reader pining for an old, destructive relationship, he chose to dispense an unending list of existential and brooding rhetorical questions instead of practical advice. However he recently redeemed himself with this column about infidelity and it’s a really strong example of what makes his work worth reading.

2. Be funny but not moronic: Dan Katz excels at this and Saturdays just wouldn’t be the same without reading his Modern Manners column in the Good Weekend.  Even when tested by a particularly earnest set of questions Katz always manages good humour without resorting to insult or scorn and to be funny without being predictable. His subject matter is also testimony to the surprising fact that we still care about “rules” and behaviour and that questions of social etiquette didn’t stop being relevant in the 1950s.

3. Tackle taboos: Just “Ask Bossy” who has the ability and nerve to dive headfirst into a whole stack of skeletons in peoples closets with admirable clout and a large dose of common sense. And that’s no mean feat considering many of the questions she answers reveal skeletons and closets most of us would rather not face at all.  For example, some of her recent posts include, “My daughter’s boyfriend is well-hung…”, “Should I settle for the fat guy” and “Should I lower my standards to lose my virginity”.

Randy Cohen also writes about modern moral dilemmas in his weekly column “The Ethicist” for the New York Times however his questions tend to be based on notions of prinicple and the finer points of “right and wrong”. This column was written back in 2007 but its still an absolute must read for the dilemma it raises. The woman writes to Cohen that she’d been recently asked by a friend in her will to make copies of her diary and distribute to the people mentioned, not favourably, in its pages after her death.

4. Be honest: Sam de Brito should be mandatory reading for any woman looking for insight into the male mind because hisdaily column “All Men are Liars” provides a great bridge between the sexes. He’s funny, likeable and brutally honest and because he tends to be quite self-deprecating, it’s also a very refreshing read.

5. Share knowledge:  A strong “expert” advice column is hard to beat. Do you remember Dolly Doctor? There aren’t many women of my generation who didn’t grow up devouring the tiny column between the tender and impressionable ages of 14 right through to 18 and 19. Employment and jobs advice columns are also worth their weight in gold. Ask Kate over at CareerOne is a great example of this, scroll through the archives and find a well-constructed answer to almost every job related challenge you can think of.