RULES FOR WRITING GOOD

Reprinted from: The Leaflet (Fall 1979),
the journal of the New England Association of Teachers of English,
identifying contentious issues in grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, and discourse

  1. Every pronoun should agree with their antecedent.
  2. People like you and I should have no problems with grammatical case.
  3. Verbs in any essay has to agree with their subject.
  4. It isn't good to be someone whom people realize confuse who and whom.
  5. Nobody should never use double negatives.
  6. A writer should not shift your point of view.
  7. When writing, participles ought not to be dangled.
  8. Join clauses good, like a good writer should.
  9. Do not write run-on sentences, it is bad style.
  10. Sentence fragments. Watch our for them.
  11. In letters themes reports and the like use commas to separate items in a list.
  12. If teachers have ever told you that you don't put a comma before that, they were right.
  13. Its essential to use apostrophe's properly.
  14. You shouldn't abbrev.
  15. Always check to see if you have anything out.
  16. Take care to never seriously and purposely split infinitives.
  17. Never idly use a preposition to end a sentence with, because that is the kind of thing up with which no right-minded person will put.
  18. In my own personal opinion I myself think that authors when they are writing should not persuade themselves that it is all right to use too many unnecessary words; the reason for this is because you should express yourself concisely.

Additional Rules For Writing Good

  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?

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