- Always avoid alliteration.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
- Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
- It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
- Contractions aren't necessary.
- Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
- One should never generalize.
- Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always best.
- Don't be redundant; don't use more words than are absolutely necessary; it's highly superfluous.
- Don't never use a double negation.
- Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
- If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
- A writer must not shift your point of view.
- Place a pronoun as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to its antecedent.
- Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
- If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
- Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
- Always pick on the correct idiom.
- 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, anyway?
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- Employ the vernacular.
- Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice.
- Do not overuse exclamation marks!!!!!
- And never begin a sentence with a conjunction.
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