Off the Net
HOW TO WRITE GOOD
- Avoid alliteration always.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
- 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 ever generalize.
- Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "I hate quotations."
- Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
- Don't be redundant; people find constant repetitiveness a turnoff. Repeating things already said can be annoying to others, as well. Besides, it makes people mad.
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always best.
- One-word sentences? Eliminate.
- Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
- The passive voice is to be avoided.
- Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
- Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- Don't use considerably more words than those which figuring one way or another are really necessary.