Good writing. Good writing is the basis for weblogging. Good books about how to write learn are On writing well and Style: toward clarity and grace. If you don't feel like reading books, this list might help as well:
- Avoid alliteration.
- Prepositions dangle awkwardly if you use them to end sentences with.
- Avoid clichés and colloquialisms like the plague, or you will seem old hat.
- Employ the vernacular, while eschewing arcane and obfuscatory verbiage.
- Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Take it easy with parenthetical remarks (however relevant), to avoid chopping up sentences (unnecessarily (we might add)).
- To ever, however artfully, split an infinitive, marks you as grammatically challenged.
- Skip the foreign words and phrases you know, n’est-ce pas?
- Never generalize.
- “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Comparisons can clog up writing as badly as alliterations and cliches.
- Avoid redundancy and verbosity, or readers will think you are repeating yourself and using too many words as well besides.
- We really get @*&%$**)!! when you use vulgarities.
- Clear, specific writing beats vagueness, we suppose. Whatever.
- Overstatement totally destroys any credibility you ever had forever.
- Understatement can, at times, perhaps shade a point to the point of its fading away.
- One word sentences? Eliminate.
- Analogies work about as well as fur on a flounder.
- “Is” just sits there. Pick verbs that do something.
- Even if a mixed metaphor sings, you should derail it.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
- Its distrakting too punctuat, an spel rong.
Good writing is surprisingly hard. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog]
2:09:46 AM  Categories: Pushing rectangles...
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