Rules of Grammar

[Kenneth M. Kuller <ken.kuller@veritas.com>]

 1. Don't use no double negatives. 
 2. Its important to use apostrophe's correctly. 
 3. Watch out for irregular verbs which has cropped into our 
    language. 
 4. About sentence fragments. 
 5. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent. 
 6. When dangling, you should be careful about participles. 
 7. Verbs has to agree with their subjects. 
 8. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking 
    verb is. 
 9. Remember to never split an infinitive. 
10. Don't abbrev., etc. 
11. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. As 
    Winston Churchill once said, "This is something up with 
    which I shall not put." 
12. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, 
    "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." 
13. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long 
    sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. 
14. Check to see if you any words out. 
15. In letters themes reports articles and stuff like that 
    you use commas to keep a string of objects apart. 
16. A writer must not shift your point of view as we write. 
17. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. 
18. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. 
19. Don't use run on sentences you've got to punctuate. 
20. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors—they 
    should be derailed, even when they sing. Weed out this 
    pain in the neck and throw it out the window with the 
    baby's bathwater! 
21. In my opinion, I think that an author, when he is writing, 
    should not get into the habit of making use of too many 
    unnecessary words that he does not need. 
22. Don't say the same thing more than once. It's redundant 
    and repetious. 
23. Always pick on the correct idiom. 
24. If you reread your work, you can find or rereading a 
    great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and 
    editing out more words than are necessary; they're highly 
    superfluous. 
25. The passive voice is to be avoided. 
26. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. 
27. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with 
    singular nouns in their writing. 
28. Avoid alliteration—always. 
29. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary. 
30. One should never generalize. 
31. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos. 
32. However, if you must use a foreign term, it is derigor to 
    italicize it and spell it correctly. 
33. Profanity sucks. 
34. Be more or less specific. 
35. Understatement is always best. 
36. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement. 
37. One word sentences? Eliminate! 
38. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake. 
39. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms; 
    failure to do so may really gross people out. 
40. Who ds rhneeetorical questions? 
41. Last but not least, avoid dyed-in-the-wool clichés like 
    the plague; they're old hat. Seek viable alternatives. 
42. Comparisons are as bad as clichés. 
43. Employ the vernacular. 
44. Eschew ampersands & don't overuse exclamation marks!!!!! 
45. Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence 
    should begin with a capital and end with a period, 
46. Don't use commas, that aren't necessary. 
47. Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word 
    phrase. 
48. Consult the dictionery freqently too avoid mispelling, and 
    proo fread your work! 
49. Use orthodox spelling thruout. 
50. Don't overuse "legal" phraseology; the aforesaid does not, 
    however, proscribe, foreclose and/or abolish, pro tanto, 
    each and every exception hereinafter described, respectively, 
    in regard thereto. 
51. Unless it is not really warranted, try not to put language 
    in anything but positive form. 
52. It behooves us all to avoid archaic expressions. 
53. Do not use hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use 
    it effectively. 
54. Avoid the utilization of enlarged words when a diminutive 
    one will suffice. 
55. Puns are for children, not for readers who are groan. 
56. As far as incomplete constructions, they are wrong. 
57. Do not use adverbs unusually. 
58. Make sure you hyp-henate properly. 
59. Perform a functional iterative analysis on your work to 
    root out third-generation transitional buzz words. 
60. Use parallel construction not only to be concise but also 
    clarify.