Some of you will soon be reading examples of what is below.

Mike Russell


>> HOW TO WRITE GOOD
>>
>> *Always avoid alliteration.
>>
>> * Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
>>
>> *And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
>>
>> *Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
>>
>> * Employ the vernacular.
>>
>> *Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
>>
>> *Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary (at least
>> usually).
>>
>> *A friend I spoken with recently told me he been forgetting his helping
>> verbs.
>>
>> *No sentence fragments.
>>
>> *It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
>>
>> *Contractions aren't necessary.
>>
>> *Foreign words and phrases are not apropos, though they do add a certain
>> je ne sais quoi.
>>
>> *One should never generalize.
>>
>> *Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations.
>> Tell me what you know."
>>
>> *Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
>>
>> *Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly
>> superfluous.
>>
>> *Be more or less specific.
>>
>> *Understatement might help.
>>
>> *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.
>>
>> *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.
>>
>> *In a sentence, the nouns has to agree with the verbs.
>>
>> *Don't use no double negatives.
>>
>> *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.
>>
>> *Proofread your work, so you don't leave some out or forget to finish
>>
>> *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.
>>
>> *To have been using excessively complex verb constructions, is to have
>> been bopping the literary baloney.