Nineteen examples of good writing advice gone bad

Susan Fitzell, M.Ed., CSP — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:36:29 +0000

THE GARBLED GRAMMARIAN SAYS …

1. Beware of run-on sentences they are hard to read anyway they confuse people break your ideas up into separate units that can stand alone.

2. Spoken or text-messaged English, has, like, different standards from formal written English, but, like, OMG, u c a lot of ppl 2day who 4get that.

3. Learn too spell it write even tho ewe are use sing a comp pewter; spell-check may knot cache every miss steak ewe make.

4. Your verbs has to agree with their subjects.

5. Step up to the plate and tackle the problem head-on: avoid mixed metaphors.

6. The passive voice should only rarely be used. In most cases, it must be avoided. Writers must be reminded of this rule at every opportunity.

7. Employ the semicolon intelligently, always use it to replace a missing conjunction; and never use it where the conjunction is already there; but don’t use it too much.

8. Sentence fragments. Bad idea. Usually.

9. Eschew obfuscation.

10. Eliminate redundant repetitions that say the same thing more than once.

11. Ask yourself: Did you accidentally any words out or

add add any that don’t belong?

12. Anyways, irregardless of your audience, you lose alot of credibility when you use words that don’t exist.

13. Editing carefully, dangling participles must be revised out of every sentence in which they appear.

14. A person who uses a singular verb with a plural pronoun deserves to have their head examined.

15. “Writers who ‘foolishly’ and “inconsistently” use ‘quotation “marks'” for “emphasis,” rather than to attribute quoted text to a specific source, inevitably

confuse their ‘readers.” ‘ “””

16. i predict that your Capitalization mistakes Will come back to Haunt you.

17. Punctuation problems too may leave your reader confused

XVII. When creating a numbered list of items, number each item properly and consistently.

19. Having saved the best for last, I definitely don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but it’s a foregone conclusion that you must look before you leap when writing, which means avoiding cliches as though your life depended on it.

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Nineteen examples of good writing advice gone bad