Got this in my inbox this morning, and thought it could be useful around here:
HOW TO WRITE GOOD

by Frank L. Visco

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

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 use more 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?
    

Found at:

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs36 ... ting/writing.caveats.html

grammar always helps.

Quote :

How to Write Well

This is cool.

Quote from bunder9999 :

grammar always helps.

Where`s your detector (or is it mine) ?


e: - SPOILER Warning.


Every sentence is constructed as an example of what it means.

Quote from STF :

Where`s your detector (or is it mine) ?

actually, i think it's mine... "grammar always helps" is a sentence fragment.

Very good.

nice

These are all types of writing styles, nothing wrong with that. Unless it is some kind of a joke.

You should of waited for more replys before spoiling it!

nice

Sorry, added spoiler warning, sometimes I wish this forum had a spoiler tag.

Nice post!

I think to learn writing you need to learn reading first and I wonder how many will read your post passed point 12...I think for many like me here, we come from all over the world and good plain English in writing is quite a challenge, often we learn the stuff we read and try to reproduce it...so I would say to learn to ''write english good'' you need to be careful what you read!

Personally I am French, I live in the Netherlands and use English the biggest part of the day, it can get quite confusing when I am on TS with French guys, typing English in server chat and my wife comes to ask me something in Dutch...I just forget what language I was thinking...But I always try my best!

Quote from bunder9999 :

grammar always helps.

haha, thanks for pointing that out. It was driving me nuts to look at the incorrect title on the topics page

The title is sort of ironic.

Reguarding the actually topic of this artical: Some of this applies more to prose than this kind of conversational type of writing. Passive writing is almost impossable to avoid in a newspaper artical. Even a great novel will be passive about 5% of the time.

Well.

itt: People who think these are awesome rules and don't see the joke. You'd think the title was a dead giveaway

Can't believe how many missed the point here.

Wait, yes I can.

edit: and almost all of them are native English speakers...

It amuses me that people are taking this as actual advice and not a humorous list of grammatical tendencies.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

You should have waited for more replies before spoiling it!

Fixed!

I'd just like to point out that a few native English speakers did read the article, laughed, and didn't post. We just appear dumb by strength of numbers!

We're not all dense as the above in English written. /deliberate

Quote from becky rose :

i'd just like to point out that a few native english speakers did read the article, laughed, and didn't post. We just appear dumb by strength of numbers!

+1

It wasn't until I was halfway down the thread when I realised it was a joke

It is a crime to rhyme.



One thing I always notice about my own writing is that I will use two of the same word very close together, over one or two sentences. I always read back my stuff and think that I should use another word instead of the one that I've doubled up on. Not sure if that makes sense, and I'm probably unable to give examples.

(In forums which have an edit button, I tend to hardcore edit my posts until they flow as best they can and I've gotten all the typos and spelling mistakes out. I see it as a kind of forum courtesy I guess. I always feel uncomfortable writing on forums without edit buttons :schwitz

Same here Mr Kar. Often as not, I'll edit a post around ten times to get it flowing right. And I hate it when I use the same word twice in quick succession, but that's what Thesauruses (not sure about the 'es' on the end, as I think it's a greek work, and is probably the same plural as singular) were invented for.

Lists like these have a pretty long history, and I'm sure I read this one before, at Uni, back in the early nineties. But it's worthy of recycling. Only I missed "Dont' use no double negatives".

A bit of googling brought up more examples here.

I allways editt my posts to fx speeling misteaks. It aids in readblity of teh wrods.