RULES FOR GOODER WRITING

(I got these from Dr. Layton Talbert.)

1. Don’t never use no double negatives (nor triple ones neither).
2. And never begin a sentence with a conjunction.
3. Watch out for run-on sentences you need to be sure to punctuate properly.
4. Sentence fragments that are very bad also.
5. Do not use commas, where they are not needed.
6. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.
7. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration (starting successive sayings in a sentence with the same sound stinks, stylistically speaking).
8. It’s bad to ever split infinitives.
9. Be generally specific, more or less.
10. Avoid clichés like the plague; go the extra mile to eliminate them.
11. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
12. Use of the passive voice should be avoided.
13. Double check your writing to be sure you didn’t any words out.
14. Be very, very careful never ever to use words you do not really need which are unnecessarily redundant, repetitive, and tautological.
15. Verbs and helping verbs always has to agree.
16. As to rhetorical questions, who needs them?
17. If dangling, you should not use modifiers.
18. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times—avoid hyperbole.
19. Don’t abbrev.
20. A subject should always agree with their antecedent.
21. It looks REALLY tacky to use lots and lots of devices for EMPHASIS!!!!!!!
22. He whom uses improper pronoun cases shows hisself to be someone for who extra assistance in English is needed to help he.
23. You should always try to avoid, whenever possible in the context of writing extended prose—or, for that matter, even poetry—stringing out a main thought (or thoughts) too long so that it is difficult for the reader(s) to follow the main idea that you are trying to get across because of your proclivity/proclivities to, as it were, “qualify yourself around the block” (as my high school English teacher once commented on a paper of mine), even though your intention to be as thorough and accurate as possible in your expression of an idea may be commendable, because despite the fact that it is theoretically possible to construct such a sentence which is not technically a run-on (and it is certainly not a fragment, unless you, the writer, go on for so long that even you lose your train of thought and fail to complete the sentence), it is, nevertheless, extremely difficult, if not downright tedious, for the reader to have to labor through it (as a college professor of mine once rhetorically retorted after a long sentence in another paper of mine, “Would you like to have to diagram this sentence?” –it was Dr. Henson, by the way) and you would not want to put this kind of burden on anyone, would you now?