An Intern’s Guide To Grammar
By Laura Anderson (Laura gave us permission to share this) (thanks, Laura!)
1. Make the honest attempt not to utilize protracted, time-consuming and/or
overwrought phrasing when a diminutive word or two could be employed
to do the job equally well.
2. Your going to have to work on you’re use of homophones.
3. Eschew ampersand & abbreviations, etc.
4. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are often unnecessary.
5. Remember to never split an infinitive.
6. Contractions aren’t always appropriate.
7. Foreign words and phrases are not always apropos.
8. Sweeping generalizations are always false.
9. Eliminate quotations where possible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously
said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
10. Comparisons are often as bad as clichés.
11. Don’t be redundant repetitive, or say the same thing over and over again.
12. Be more or less specific.
13. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
14. Obscure analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
15. The passive voice is to be avoided.
16. Avoid clichés like the plague – they’re old hat.
17. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
18. Who need rhetorical questions?
19. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
20. Don’t never use a double negation.
21. capitalize each sentence and end it with punctuation
22. Every sentence a verb.
23. Verbs have to agree with its subject.
24.Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
25. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading that a great deal of
repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing your work.
26. A writer ought not to shift your point of view.
27. A preposition isn’t a good thing to end a sentence with.
28. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
29. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!! It’s amateurish!!
30. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten
or more words, to their antecedents.
31. When dangling, avoid participles.
32. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Dig?
33. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns
in their writing.
34. Always pick on the correct idiom.
35. Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.
36. About sentence fragments.
37. Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary.
38. Its important to use apostrophe’s properly.
39. Check you hyphens in any multiple-word-phrase.
40. In letters compositions reports documents and things like that we use
commas to clarify a string of items.
41. Watch for irregular verbs which have creeped into our language.
42. Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.
43. Slang and profanity such *ss.
44. u gotta no this aint a txt msg 2 ur bff.
45. Ellipses are unprofessional…almost always.
46. Only use specialty punctuation – like semi-colons, single quotations and
hyphens; if you’re absolutely sure you’re ‘doing it properly’.
47. Good working is worth you taking ownership of verbs.
48. Finish your thought because if you don’t.
49. Make sure and use the correct verb phrase if you’re going to try and
communicate.
50. Only use ‘that’ for clauses which restrict the focus of a sentence or which
supply essential meaning. Additional information, that doesn’t change the
meaning of the sentence, should be set apart with commas and use ‘which.’