The Tortured Prose Department: How Not to Write Like Taylor Swift

When she announced her engagement to the football player Travis Kelce on Instagram, Taylor Swift captioned the post: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” She echoed a lyric from her love song “So High School”: “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” But the origins of this particular self-styling are fairly recent. Swift had always been acknowledged as a talented lyricist, but, until around five years ago, “writer,” let alone writing teacher, had not been so thoroughly incorporated into her personal branding.  

That designation seems to have arrived with her 2020 album Folklore. The album, its title stylised in lowercase, its cover art depicting the (song)writer gazing contemplatively into foggy treetops, was pitched perfectly to the back-to-nature, contemplative, indeed somewhat literary mood of those who lived comfortably during the Covid lockdowns. Even the vagueness of the title seemed designed to encompass every connotation of the word: an ancient tradition, mysterious nature, plaintive beauty, the magic of storytelling. The music on the album is pretty good, and some of the songs are excellent. Yet the aesthetic decisions behind it signalled the start of a sinister onslaught: the total defeat of Swift’s actual lyricism in pursuit of an immature notion of “lyricism.” 

Credit: WordPress

By the release of her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department, that transformation was complete. So while the album was publicised with library pop-ups, it also included lyrics such as “We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” and “I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” And, worst of all: “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing […] Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see.” Why is it the worst of all? Because rather than just being juvenile, like the 1830s lyric, it attempts a sort of high literary mode with metaphors and elevated vocabulary. But it fails by mixing metaphors—how can vipers wear clothes, which would just pool around them?—and self-consciously flourishing its vocabulary words. The result is more juvenile because of how obviously it strives for “lyricism,” to the point of becoming a tongue-twister. The title seems to represent a similar effort, as though Swift took a thesaurus to each word of Dead Poets Society to produce it. I used to do the same thing—when I was fifteen and got told that I wasn’t using enough (as a teacher called them) “ten-dollar words.” On The Life of a Showgirl, the problem intensifies: “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness,” she sings, on “Eldest Daughter.” Wouldn’t it be more effective to set the thesaurus aside, stop overcomplicating things, and say, “I’m sick of myself”? 

So Swift might not make a great English teacher because she’s recently picked up the habits of an overeager English student. In her hands, language has become a blunt instrument, chasing elaborate expression over precise meaning. But there is still a lesson in her song-writing which can be found by returning to a simpler time—2012 's “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It’s hard to deny the straightforward energy of lines like, “I say, ‘I hate you,’ we break up, you call me, ‘I love you’ ”; or “You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me.” These lines aren’t clogged with ostentatious words, and they have a rhythmical clarity. The song is engaging because it is straightforward: because it gets to the point, to mix a metaphor of my own, instead of circling the drain.  

It’s understandable why Swift’s writer era coincided with her new, exaggerated “lyricism.” If you want to write, then you probably love language; and if you love language, then you want to use as much of it as possible. But ten-dollar words, fifty-dollar words, thousand-pound words—they can weigh down a line, and often they sink it. What matters most is choosing the right word, expressing an idea with economy and grace. Swift has unlearned this, though perhaps she can learn it back. On “But Daddy I Love Him,” she does arrive at one insight: “Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all.” She’s onto something here.  

Precocious writing may be impressive—if you’re fifteen—but it’s never good. To write well, you have to grow up.