Thursday, May 25, 2006

Major Bedhead Presents, For Your Edification:

Grammar Rules for the Unenlightened; Or, How to Write Good

Don't use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice.

Don't use no double negatives. Don't never use no triple negatives.

No sentence fragments.
Corollary: Complete sentences: important.

Stamp out and eliminate redundancy.

Avoid cliches like the plague.

All generalizations are bad.

Take care that your verb and subject is in agreement.

A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.

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...

You should never use the second person.

The passive voice should never be used.

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...

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "I hate quotations."

Excessive use of exclamation points can be disastrous!!!!!

Don't use question marks inappropriately?

Don't obfuscate your theses with extraneous verbiage.

Never use that totally cool, radically groovy out-of-date slang.

Avoid tumbling off the cliff of triteness into the black abyss of overused metaphors.

Keep your ear to the grindstone, your nose to the ground, take the bull by the horns of dilemma, and stop mixing your metaphors.

Avoid those abysmally horrible, outrageously repellent exaggerations.

Avoid any awful anachronistic aggravating antediluvian alliterations.

This sentence no verb.



15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love that t-shirt. Do they ship to CAnada?

If not a mother... said...

very funny!

Major Bedhead said...

beaniebaby - the website is www.onehorseshy.com I can't see why they wouldn't.

Joke said...

Priceless!

-J.

Lyrehca said...

You write goodly, Julia.

Jess said...

Have you read "Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay?"

Lovely, easy to read, even funny. You might like it tremenjously.

Sandra Miller said...

What an extraordinarily edifying entry!!!!

Major Bedhead said...

dgb - no, but grammar/punctuation/word usage books are my weakness. It's a sickness.

Bad. Bad Sandra.

art-sweet said...

Reading this entry was so fun!!!!

(off to order that t-shirt for Pili. And maybe for me. And my mom.)

Kerri. said...

Julia - Have you read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves?" by Lynne Truss? I think you might like it...

Major Bedhead said...

Kerri - yes. It is my Bible.

Anonymous said...

I want to make sure you know about Language Log. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/

Vivian said...

Ok now I am very paranoid of anyone reading my blog.

Jamie said...

I'm with Vivian .... now I'm paranoid.

Angewl said...

I have always been paranoid. lol