The Sixty Step Guide to Writing Good
This seems to be a plagiarism of W. Safire, with more things added.
1. Always avoid alliteration at all opportunities.
2. Cliches are like killing flies with a shotgun and should be avoided like the plague.
3. Try to avoid abbrev. & ampersands.
4. Don't use contradictions. They're unnecessary.
5. Exaggeration is the greatest evil in writing and will doom you to eternal damnation in the lowest depths of Hades.
6. You should never shift my point of view in his writing.
7. Don't repeat yourself. It is redundant and should be avoided because of it's repetitiveness since it is superfluous.
8. Due knot all ways rely on a spell Czech two due you're work four ewe.
9. Don't use no double negatives. Don't never use no triples nor quadruples neither.
10. Just between you and I, case is important.
11. One word sentences? Avoid.
12. Sentence fragments.
13. Commas, are not, always, necessary.
14. Try to avoid split infinitives.
15. The passive tense is to be avoided.
16. Similies are like a snake with feathers, pointless.
17. Together easily, clauses should go.
18. One should never generalize.
19. Why would one use a rhetorical question?
20. Profanity sucks.
21. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
22. Parenthesis (although helpful) can usually be avoided.
23. Do not use hyphens to connect all two-word phrases.
24. A verb need to agrees with the noun.
25. Don't verbify nouns.
26. A preposition should never be used to end sentences with.
27. Sarcasm in writing is good. Really.
28. One can use statistics to prove anything. 41% of people know that.
29. only capitalize Proper Nouns and the beginnings of Sentences.
30. Don't contradict yourself in writing.
31. Contradictions can be used when desired.
32. Its important to put apostrophe's where necessary.
33. Do not actuate singular utterances to influence the persuasions of others because it becomes extrinsic, extraneous, and incommodious to fathom.
34. Make sure the antecedent is modifies in it.
35. Always proofread to check for any missing .
36. Commas can be used to separate in lists multiple modifiers letter heads clause separations and such.
37. In writing; punctuation. should be double checked:
38. Make sure to acknowledge sources and help, as someone said.
39. Brevity is...wit.
40. Lying in writing is acceptable and fine.
41. Slang may be hip and groovy at the time, but can get old fast (and that ain't no jive)
42. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
43. Poetry is the only time, when one should try to rhyme. In just regular prose, all it brings is reading woes.
44. Avoid run-on sentences through the use of punctuation as well as dividing the single sentence into a series of smaller sentences for the sake of the reader not having to read a really long sentence especially since such sentences become redundant and hard to understand.
45. Ye shouldeth always be in avoidance of olde English.
46. Overused adjectives aren't good.
47. Don't use made up words like kajillions of other amatuer writers.
48. Using an idiom can leave the author in a pickle.
49. Foreign phrases should be avoided a outrance.
50. Don't ya' be usin' no Ebonics, 'cuz it don't be no real language.
51. Colloquialisms just don't cut it in writing.
52. Alot of words are not one word, but two.
53. When used in writing, modifiers can be confusing.
54. Never reveal everything you know.