How To Write Good - Page 3

**SeaStone** · 10-09-2007, 10:34 PM

Quote:

HOW TO WRITE GOOD

Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)

4. Employ the vernacular.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren't necessary.

9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

10. One should never generalize.

11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.

13. Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

14. Profanity sucks.

15. Be more or less specific.

16. Understatement is always best.

17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

20. The passive voice is to be avoided.

21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

24. While a transcendent vocabulary is laudable, one must nevertheless keep incessant surveillance against such loquacious, effusive, voluble verbosity that the calculated objective of communication becomes ensconced in obscurity.

25. In a sentence, the nouns has to match the verbs.

26. Don't use no double negatives.

27. In writing, few things are, so to speak, more infuriating, than, say, commas, at least when there are too many of them, or when they should be, say, semicolons.

28. Proofread your work, so you don't leave some out or forget to finish

29. Run-on sentences are really bad because the reader saturates and what you really should be doing is using commas and semicolons and even periods to break the sentence up into more digestible chunks.

30. To have been using excessively complex verb constructions, is to have been bopping the literary baloney.

31. A friend I spoken with recently told me he been forgetting his helper verbs.

Haha.

I R DANIEL (Sin · 04-01-2008, 09:33 PM

i think it really depends on what is your writing style.

but i would like to add/correct a few.

1. 'contractions are not necessary' and absolutely should not be used.

2. KISS (keep it simple stupid). the point of writing, for the most part, is to get as many people as possible to read you work. and by using big words, you may be limiting your audience. i know i get turned off to reading when every sentence i have to reach for a dictionary.

3. parenthetical marks can be used, but they show what ever information is inside of them, is not as important as what is out side of them.

4. learn the difference between their, they're, and there.

5. excessive use of profanity does 'suck'. but if that is who your character is, then use it.

Stossel · 04-01-2008, 09:56 PM

I can sum up this entire thread: I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.

That's it. It's over.

**Ristaron** · 04-02-2008, 12:16 PM

Man, these are oooooooooold.

No, serious, I'm talking OLD. They were written by Mark Twain around the same time he wrote Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.

That's, like, 120 years ago old...

Get with the times.

**SeaStone** · 04-02-2008, 01:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ristaron

Man, these are oooooooooold.

No, serious, I'm talking OLD. They were written by Mark Twain around the same time he wrote Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.

That's, like, 120 years ago old...

Get with the times.

This thread is ooooooooooold, yet this is the first time you've posted this.

Like 176 days old....

Get with the times.