Writing Rules
- Avoid alliteration. Always.
- Eschew obfuscation.
- Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
- Employ the vernacular.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
- It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
- Contractions aren't necessary
- Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
- One should never generalize.
- Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
- Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
- Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
- Profanity sucks.
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always best.
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- One-word sentences? Eliminate.
- Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
- It is important to never ever under any circumstances split an
infinitive.
- Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
- Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
- Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
- Just between you and I case is important.
- Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
- Watch out for irregular verbs which have crope into our language.
- Don't use no double negatives.
- A writer mustn't shift your point of view.
- When dangling, don't use participles.
- Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
- Don't write a run-on sentence you have to punctuate it.
- About sentence fragments.
- In a letter themes reports articles and stuff like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.
- Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
- Its very important that you use apostrophe's right.
- Don't abbrev.
- Check to see if you have any words out.
- As far as incomplete constructions, they are wrong.
- Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.
- The active voice is preferred.
- Use of the passive voice is to be avoided.
- Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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