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 cliches 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 cliches. 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. ------ ref: stumbleupon Add your own rules. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The list actually contradicts itself, right even in the title. It's "How to Write WELL", not 'good'. Wow. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Sorry Q. Didn't see your post. A day late and a dollar short, I am. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
35. Don't contradict yourself or 'flip-flop' numerous times within one topic. *cough*SAM*cough* 36. Do not avoid questions because you don't have an answer. Just admit you don't know. *cough*SAM*cough*
My vote is for "How to eloquently produce written narrative" either that, or "how to write your goodest"
35. Contribution is more productive than criticism, so will you effing stop with the trolling and get on with it?
