50 Grammar Rules for the Unenlightened; Or, How to Write Good (Original source unknown)
1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. Winston Churchill, corrected on this error once, responded to the young man who corrected him by saying "Young man, that is the kind of impudence up with which I will not put!"
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
6. Also, avoid any awful anachronistic aggravating antediluvian alliterations.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies endlessly over and over again.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren't always necessary and shouldn't be used to excess so don't.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not always apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous and can be excessive. Stamp out and
eliminate redundancy.
14. Avoid those run-on sentences that just go on, and on, and on, they never stop, they just keep rambling, and you really wish the person would just shut up, but no, they just keep going, they're worse than the Energizer Bunny, they babble incessantly, and these sentences, they just never stop, they go on forever...if you get my drift…
15. You should never use the second person.
16. All generalizations are bad.
17. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
18. Don't use no double negatives. Don't never use no triple negatives.
19. Avoid excessive use of ampersands & abbrevs., etc.
20. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
21. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake (Unless they are as good as gold).
22. The passive voice should never be used..
23. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words, however, should be enclosed in commas.
24. Never use a big word when substituting a diminutive one would suffice.
25. Don't overuse exclamation points!!!
26. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
27. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth-shaking ideas.
28. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed and use it correctly with words' that show possession.
29. Don't use too many quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations."
30. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a billion times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
31. Besides, hyperbole is always overdone, anyway.
32. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
33. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
34. Keep your ear to the grindstone, your nose to the ground, take the bull by the horns of a dilemma, and stop mixing your metaphors. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
35. Who needs rhetorical questions? However, what if there were no rhetorical questions?
36. Corollary: Complete sentences: important.
37. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement. Avoid those abysmally horrible, outrageously repellent exaggerations.
38. Avoid "buzz-words"; such integrated transitional scenarios complicate simplistic matters.
39. People don't spell "a lot" correctly alot of the time.
40. Each person should use their possessive pronouns correctly.
41. All grammar and spelling rules have exceptions (with a few exceptions)....Morgan's Law.
42. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
43. The dash - a sometimes useful punctuation mark - can often be overused - even though it's a helpful tool some of the time.
44. Proofread carefully to make sure you don't repeat repeat any words.
45. Never go off on tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at only one point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the sixth century, which was an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what we now know as Poland..
46. Don't use question marks inappropriately?
47. Don't obfuscate your theses with extraneous verbiage.
48. Never use that totally cool, radically groovy, out-of-date slang.
49.Avoid tumbling off the cliff of triteness into the black abyss of overused metaphors.
50. In writing, it's important to remember that dangling sentences
(Feel free to add you own!)
