Fun_People Archive
17 May
How To Write English Good

Date: Tue, 17 May 94 14:30:41 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: How To Write English Good

Forwarded-by: cate3@netcom.com (Henry Cate)

Loosely translated from the writings of technical journalists, personal
friends, a retired (retarded?) Army General....


                    HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH GOOD
          from the Casey Stengle School of Brooklynese

     (1)  Just between you and I case is important.

     (2)  Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

     (3)  Don't use no double negatives.

     (4)  A preposition is something you should never end a
          sentence with.  (or as Sir Winston Churchill once
          said; "This is the type of nonsense up with I will
          not put!").

     (5)  It is always good practice to never split infini-
          tives.

     (6)  About sentence fragments.

     (7)  Don't write a run-on sentence you have to punctu-
          ate it.

     (8)  When one is writing, it is important to maintain
          your point of view.

     (9)  Proofread your work. Do not tolerate mispellings!

     (10) Watch out for irregular verbs which have croped
          into the language.

     (11) Don't say the same thing more than once. It's
          redundant and repetitious.

     (12) If the writer is considerate of the reader, he
          won't have a problem with ambiguous sentences.

     (13) This sentence no verb.

     (14) You should be aware of the conditional case if you
          was to use it.

     (15) The smothering of verbs is a cause of the weaken-
          ing of the sentence impact.

     (16) Avoid the utilization of enlarged words when shor-
          tened ones will do.

     (17) Perform a functional iterative analysis on your
          work to root out third generation transitional
          buzz words.

     (18) Make sure you hyp-henate properly.

     (19) Sentences should be written in the active voice
          when giving instructions, so that the subject of
          the action can be identified clearly.

     (20) Avoid the use of dyed-in-the-wool cliches.

     (21) The defacto use of foreign phrases vis-a-vis plain
          English in your written tete-a-tetes makes the
          sentence harder to understand.

     (22) Continuity of thought, logical development and
          smooth transitions are important. Never leave
          the reader guessing.

     (23) Beware of malapropisms. They are a communist sub-
          mersive plot.

     (24) Join clauses good like a conjunction should.

     (25) Each pronoun should agree with their antecedent.

     (26) It has come to our considered attention that in a
          large majority of cases, far too many people use a
          great deal more words than is absolutely necessary
          when engaged in the practice of writing sentences.

     (27) Be careful of dangling participles writing a
          paper.

© 1994 Peter Langston