Saturday, June 14, 2008

Rules for writing: A cool teacher's list

Don't you wish you had a cool teacher who gave you a list of writing rules like this when you were in school? Another variation on my recent how not to communicate theme.

Here are the top ten rules for writers from the 34-rule list by Dr. Gregory S. Jay, Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee:

English professor line art lecture male school teacher manProfessor Jay's Writing Rules:
  1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
  2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
  3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
  4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
  5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
  6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
  7. Be more or less specific.
  8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
  9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
  10. No sentence fragments.
  11. - 34. Click here for the whole list of writing rules.

Woman teacher podium school lectureOther interesting language articles:

1 comment:

  1. Generally, I tend to break many rules and add in many extraneous descriptions. If a writer adheres to all rules too strictly, style can become crippled. Nonetheless, it's still a good list of rules!

    ReplyDelete