- Always avoid annoying alliteration.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
- Employ the vernacular.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
- It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
- Contractions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
- Foreign words and phrases aren’t apropos. Even if they are Lingua Franca.
- One should never generalise.
- Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations, tell me what you know.”
- Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
- Don’t be redundant or overly verbose. Don’t use more words than necessary, it’s highly superfluous.
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forward earth-shaking ideas.
- 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. Track them down until the cows turn blue in the face.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
- And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
- Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
- No sentence fragments.
- Don’t use no double negatives.
- Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
- Never use a big word when substituting a diminutive one would suffice.
- Kill all exclamation points!!!
- Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
- Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
- If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
- Puns are for children, not groan readers.
- Avoid “buzz-words”; such integrated transitional scenarios complicate simplistic matters.
- Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Categories: Wordy humour
1 Comment
Marie Shallcross · October 13, 2011 at 9:38 am
love it :-}
(oops no Capital letter at the start)
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