{"id":546,"date":"2004-11-09T22:10:17","date_gmt":"2004-11-10T02:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=546"},"modified":"2004-11-09T22:11:53","modified_gmt":"2004-11-10T02:11:53","slug":"rules-for-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2004\/11\/rules-for-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Rules for writers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>I shamelessly lifted this from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chattablogs.com\/aionioszoe\/\">This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Important Rules for Writing Good<\/p>\n<p>1. Avoid alliteration. Always.<br \/>\n2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.<br \/>\n3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They&#8217;re old hat.)<br \/>\n4. Employ the vernacular.<br \/>\n5. Eschew ampersands &#038; abbreviations, etc.<br \/>\n6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.<br \/>\n7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.<br \/>\n8. Contractions aren&#8217;t necessary.<br \/>\n9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.<br \/>\n10. One should never generalize.<br \/>\n11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: &#8220;I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.&#8221;<br \/>\n12. Comparisons are as bad as clich\u00e9s.<br \/>\n13. Don&#8217;t be redundant; don&#8217;t use more words than necessary; it&#8217;s highly superfluous.<br \/>\n14. Be more or less specific.<br \/>\n15. Understatement is always best.<br \/>\n16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.<br \/>\n17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.<br \/>\n19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.<br \/>\n19. The passive voice is to be avoided.<br \/>\n20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.<br \/>\n21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.<br \/>\n22. Who needs rhetorical questions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I shamelessly lifted this from This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis. Important Rules for Writing Good 1. Avoid alliteration. Always. 2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. 3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They&#8217;re old hat.) 4. Employ the vernacular. 5. Eschew ampersands &#038; abbreviations, etc. 6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) &#8230; <a title=\"Rules for writers\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2004\/11\/rules-for-writers\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Rules for writers\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}